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Today I decided to have a listen on the bands, as I was fed up sitting around my room either working on my dissertation or some other form of assignment which needed completing. I started off on 17m noticed some RTTY and worked a UA4 and a RD4.

After this I moved down to 20m which seemed rather lively on RTTY for a change and after a quick CQ call I worked UN1, US6, YO6, UA6, IZ8, W4, UR5, UA1, VE1, G4 I was pleased that the band opened to the States and Canada.

Later on I decided to start setting up DM780 for SSTV, as it’s not a mode I’ve tried so hopefully later today I will have had a QSO.

This Sunday, I will be attending the Kempton Radio Rally, not after anything specific although I am on the look out for bits I need to do the Intermediate exam! as I ordered a morse code generator which requires a 1watt speaker to function and also need some thin wire to connect it.

If you see me (Hard to miss!) do say hello.

I’ve literally just got home after leaving Dartford at 1pm, and it’s now 6pm we got struck by lots of engineering works in London and also between Didcot Park Way and Oxford. But you’ve not come to hear about my ramblings about the UK transport system.

Day 1:

We started the contest around 6am Saturday morning due to the lack of people being able to start at midnight but that didn’t stop us! I woke up at 7am and got myself ready to head for Dartford to help operate the contest. On arrival at lunch time we had around 240q but conditions didn’t seem that great and getting runs was difficult.

During the later part of the afternoon we hit trouble with the amplifier (AMPUK Explorer 1200) and this pushed us to barefoot with an FT1000MP Field (100watts) but we kept plodding on into the night getting the odd run and mostly doing a lot of S&P.

The night shifters where Bob VE3SRE, Robert G8ITB, Paul, M3JFM and myself we somehow managed to split it so everyone did there share of the operating, and while you wasn’t doing that you could catch up on sleep or just have a chat with one and other.

Even with 100w we where working into the states and Canada on 20/40/80 without too much difficulty and sometimes surprised people when we told them the situation.

Day 2

Sunday was going to prove interesting at 1am the clocks went forward one hour so as most people put it we lost 1hr of sleep! We kept at the low bands working the odd station on 160 but mostly sticking to 80 and 40m. At 9am most of the contesting team was back on site and got to experience the lack of runs and again kept to s&p on 20m and the picking up the odd mult on 15m.

By noon we removed the 160 and 80m dipoles to speed up taking down the station later on. Dave (G4BUO) arrived with a KW-1000 amp later on in the afternoon but I’m told by Simon (2E0CVN) it didn’t make much difference.

The end score was

Total: 1029 QSOs, Prefixes = 543, Total Score = 1,045,818

Equipment:

FT1000MP, AMPUK Explorer 1200, Yagi for 20-10m, Dipoles for 160, 80, 40m
Software Win-Test

More pictures at http://flickr.com/photos/m3php/sets/72157604324850942/�

Over the last week, we’ve (PrettyGoodProjects) been developing a web application that’s been in the planning for some time, which is a product finder site for amateur radio transmitters by answering a few options which are displayed on the screen.

We recently launched the first beta of the application onto the wild, which can be found at www.pickmyrig.com there’s a very limited selection of radios currently in the database but this should start to grow over the coming weeks as we add more products.

The features should improve too with the option to add radios you to your user account so you can find them at a later point, also leave comments and give them a star rating

To keep the site running and to cover the costs we’re displaying ads on the search pages but in a non intrusive manner so we hope users will find them useful. We’re also looking to team up with amateur radio shops to provide links to buy the radios themselves

Go check it out at www.pickmyrig.com