m3php.com

After not turning on the radio yesterday today I tried to make an extra effort to actually have a few contacts on HF, after turning the radio on and going to 20m I noticed there was a lot of short path I could hear good into Ireland and could hear signals only 30miles away. Then after a bit the conditions seemed to completely change and I could easily hear into Asia.

Thus today’s 13 contacts where

• Ireland (SSB)
• Netherlands (SSB)
• Norway (SSB)
• Serbia (RTTY)
• Sweden (RTTY)
• Thailand (RTTY)
• India (RTTY)
• Poland (PSK31)
• Germany (PSK31)
• Ukraine (PSK31)
• Azerbaijan (PSK31)

Some of the digital qsos have been plotted on the map below

Today I went and visited Barry (G4AZN) to fix any computer issues he had and also try and work some radio from his place and it was a change to being at home! Conditions did seem rather poor 20m was pretty much dead, 40m was noisy and also quiet but did manage to work:

• E73ESP -
• GB0SI - Summer Isles EU092
• JW7G – Svalbard Island

Plus I went on the local club net on 160m which I cannot do at home due to limited space!

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.