The summer is over. It has left some of its heat behind but it is clear that is gone. So I am back in my main shack again after a long vacation time. Everything it looks perfect except of propagation conditions. By incidence today, after a very long period, sun appears a tiny spot (Uaoo...). The 24 circle is very lazy and denies stubbornly to start and the worst we have to live with that. As the future is not so promising, let me focus in the past. With your permission I will review some results of my previous ham activities.
The greatest is the Honor Roll achievement. Of course we celebrated it a bit early but now I have the proofs. So after of almost 30 years of DX hunting I am officially listed in Honor Roll with 329/333 entities. I proudly show you the ARRL matrix, the Lapel pin and I invite you to share with me my happiness for this achievement.
In the contesting activities I have to present you my certificate in World Wide RTTY WPX Contest as 1st in Greece and the 6th position worldwide in the spring EU PSK DX Contest. Well obviously I am not a big gun but no doubt I am a little pistol!
During summer we continue testing D-STAR with SV8CS, SV8RV and SV3KH. The real fun will start with the installation of a D-Star local repeater.
Finally I wish to all of you a nice winter and lots of such moments in your ham career.
The big events of fall in ham radio are the CQ magazine contests. This weekend we had the CQ WW RTTY contest. Every year a lot of people are traveling to hot spots as Caribbean, North West Africa, Galapagos and so on, just to have the best conditions to win the test. On the other hand a lot of hams around the world are waiting to contact with exotic call sign and rare ham radio entities just sitting in their ordinary shacks. The bands get on fire for 48 hours. I cannot express the feeling of having so many stations on the air on usually quiet bands. You can change thoroughly your opinion about propagation just participating in this event. I made 811 contacts in SOAB category, 300 more than last year. Among them very rare dx countries. That is exactly the reason I join the test every year. And I can say this one was a very rich one. Spiros (SV8CS) was working only in 15m and during the contest we had a lot fun chatting about how the things were going. By the end of weekend we found wide open the 10m band, a band that is dead for years. It kept an hour or so but it was enough to work South America and Caribbean stations and the famous HC8N. What a pleasant surprise! MixW was a real performer and the FT1000MP as well as the ACOM1000 worked without complains. But most of all what made the difference this time was the Honor Roll plague in front of me....
