My musings on Ham Radio … and stuff!
I noticed that the rising sun in the east was an unnatural deep reddish-orange color this morning. The weatherman says that it’s due to the smoke being blown eastward from the west coast wildfires. WOW! Three thousand miles away … small world!
Not much luck this morning on the radio. The bands have been pretty uncooperative the past few days, and this morning was no exception. The Europeans were coming in, but way down in signal strength. Time to read a book or something 😀 !
73 de Dick N4BC
The propagation gods giveth and the propagation gods taketh away … . Saturday was a good day for radio for me. I had over twenty POTA contacts and too many digital contacts to count. Then came Sunday!
There were plenty of spots for POTA activators, but I could not hear any of them well enough to make a solid contact. My noise levels were up and signal strengths were down. I was even having difficulties making digital contacts. The bandscope was pretty much flat for most of the day. Bummer!
Well, tomorrow is another day!
73 de Dick N4BC
I got up earlier again this Saturday and fired up the rig. I worked six POTA stations in less than an hour … pretty good mix of CW and SSB. I even worked AC8RG on 40 and 60 Meter CW. A quick check shows that that’s my first CW contact on the 60 Meter band … 5.405 MHz marks the spot!
Before that, I worked a bunch of stations on 80, 60, 40, 30, and 20 Meter FT4/8. Mostly USA and Canada, as you would expect on the lower bands, but an occasional European there too. There’s always contacts to be made on digital. Just throw your call out there and somebody will answer … almost guaranteed!
73 de Dick N4BC
This past weekend was pretty rough, propagation-wise. Here at the QTH, noise levels were quite high, and the bands seemed to be sparsely populated.
I checked the POTA spotting page and there must have been ten or fifteen activators listed, and I literally could not hear a one! Either the noise covered their signals, or I just couldn’t even discern that there WAS a signal. I gather that there was some sort of solar storm, and I noted that the sunspot number was down to zero again.
No luck! Except for the digital modes, that is! It was easy to work loads of FT-mode stations, pretty much on demand. It seems that there’re always FT QSOs to be had.
Well, every day is a new day! If you don’t like the weather today (space or terrestrial), wait until tomorrow 😀 .
73 de Dick N4BC
I got up this morning, logged into work from home, grabbed a cup of coffee, and turned on the radio to see what was brewing on FT4/8. Here’s a couple of interesting ones:
The Kazakhstan contact (UN7LZ) was an ATNO for me. KH6AP was a new one on 60 Meters.
The bands were in surprisingly good shape. I also saw Fiji and China represented, but they were pretty weak and couldn’t hear me. All in all, I worked about 10 stations on 20, 30, 40, and 60 Meters between 7 and 8 EDT before I reluctantly decided to do some real work at my real job 😀 .
73 de Dick N4BC