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After a weekend of no activity on the air I redeemed myself today and switched the radio on had a quick scan over 10m and 6m but didn’t hear any activity so decided to drop down to 10MHz and try some PSK31 as it had been a while since I was on this band.

After sending a CQ call out I had a nice stream of stations working into

• Germany
• France
• Austria
• Romania

Once this dried up I moved back to 20m PSK31 and worked into

• Poland
• Germany
• Ukraine
• Croatia – EU170

Then just as I was shutting things down for the night I worked into European Russia R45 the guy was booming 59+40. Bring on tomorrow and what conditions bring :).

Today I went along to the Newbury & District Amateur Radio Society Boot Sale just on the northern edge of Newbury with Terry (G0LUQ) and my Dad (M3JFM) we left Oxford at 8am thinking that the A34 would probably be busy but we got that completely wrong and managed to drive down within 30mins!

Thankfully we were lucky to have good weather sunny and warm if you had the sun in your face, on arrival we went along to the Oxford and DARS pitch to see what they were flogging and have a chat.

By 9am the boot sale was getting busy and there was lots of things on sale some bargains some junk (Hey you get that anywhere!) although I didn’t pick up anything Dad found a few things which he was after and also picked up a Softrock SDR receiver for 40/80 as I couldn’t get mine to work!

Over all was a great day out, was nice to meet up with friends and catch up with the news, we left around 1:30pm and arrived back into Oxford in good time.

Today’s been rather slow in most aspects with the usual looking and applying for jobs, so this afternoon I took some time out to have a listen on the bands. First thing I checked was 6m and 10m but they were both ultra quiet so decided to move down onto 20m and check the digital end of the band.

I put a CQ call out on 14.070 and to my delight people started to come back although I didn’t work any new DXCCs I managed to work

• Germany
• Poland
• France
• Lithuania
• European Russia
• Finland

All in all had 9 contacts which is better than nothing

Last weekend was IARU Region 1 National Field Day and just like any other year the Oxford & District Amateur Radio Society, was taking part from the usual location at Worminghall, which is on the boundary of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire.

Setup began on Friday afternoon once all antennas, tents etc were on site, and luckily the tower is stored on the farm where we normally operate from!

The first thing to go up was the Crushcraft A4S which had been given a good clean a week or two before the weekend, so it was all nice and shiny and hopefully would perform a lot better also setup was 40-80-160m dipoles.

While another team worked on putting up the two tents one for operating and the other used as a cook tent.

On Saturday Dad (M3JFM) and I decided to cycle up to the site which was 22miles round trip with each leg taking about 1 hour 10mins according to the small computer on my bike.

Arriving on site around 11am the equipment was being put into the operating tent this year it was G4FON’s Yaesu FT2000D and G3KLH’s ICOM IC737 and 2 laptops running some custom software made by G4FON.

While this was being setup the receiving antennas where erected K9AY loop (built by M0DDT) and an 80m dipole after this there was plenty of time for drinking tea and having a good old chinwag.