Ham radio – Page 24 – AB4UG Radioblog

NAQP RTTY 2014 contest

Spent some time playing in the North American QSO Party (RTTY) doing some casual search and pounce-ing (S&P). Made 90 contacts, including a couple operators in MS and one in RI on two bands. Hopefully they’ll upload to LoTW and I can finish off my WAS(Basic).

Most of my contacts were on 20m, and went down to 40m towards the late evening. 54 contacts on 20m and 36 contacts on 40m. The N1MM logger tells me that my contacts were worth 4410 points.

Now that I’ve got another digimode contest under my belt, I think that when it comes to contesting, I think I prefer SSB over digital. The digital mode contesting just doesn’t seem as challenging or entertaining as SSB is. That probably won’t keep me from entering other digimode contests, but when it comes to deciding which ones to participate in, I’ll probably won’t make as much of an effort to participate in digital contests.

A day on 40m PSK

Continuing on with the previous set of experiments, I left the radio listening to 40m PSK at 7.040 MHz.

40m is a very noisy band here, with a lot of random static and noise bursts across the band that make decoding digimodes more difficult.

Activity during the day was pretty sparse, and most of the stations spotted were in the late afternoon/evening hours (local time). Perhaps not a good day for 40m propagation?

Straight key base

Finally got around to working on making a base for the straight key. I cut off a section of some 1×4 lumber, sanded it nice and smooth, beveled the edges and covered it with a few coats of clear gloss polyurethane.

For some grippiness so it doesn’t slide around on the desk, I spray-glued a piece of some rubber shelf liner to the bottom.

It’s not a heavy base, and I might decide to change it later on to something more interesting looking. For now, it looks reasonably decent and gives the key a slightly bigger footprint and elevates it a little bit for more comfortable use.

Across the world on 35W

Managed to work another Australian station (VK6WB in Perth, Australia) tonight on 20m PSK using just 35W. According to qrz.com, it’s 18525.7 km away. That’s 1.9 mW/km!

I had to do a double take and wait until he called a couple times to make sure fldigi was decoding it properly. He was as loud as most of the other US stations on the waterfall.

This breaks my previous record for QSO distance (with VK3TDX) by a few thousand km.

Really loving this hobby now.

A day on 20m PSK

Like with my previous 10m experiment, I left the radio listening to 20m PSK (14.070 MHz) with fldigi sending the spots to pskreporter.info. Throughout the day, I grabbed screenshots of the map showing the spots at roughly 1-2 hour intervals. From about 2014-02-04 1100Z to 2014-02-05 0149Z (about 15 hours), these are all the stations that were spotted (click for the ginormous version).

There was the usual progression of a few EU stations during the early morning and then lots of US stations throughout the day, moving from east to west. West coast stations were starting to come in pretty well by the time i decided to turn things off. I can usually hear a lot of South American stations when I’m playing PSK, but I guess most of them weren’t transmitting yesterday.

I was also pretty surprised to see that Austrailian station (VK2KM) in there as well (spotted around 2100Z). Wish I was home to try to work it.

You can check out the entire collection of spots over in my Radio Spots album on Google+.

I think these are interesting experiments to do. I think 40m will be the next one. Might also be interesting to let it run overnight to see if the radio hears anything.