Tuesday, December 30, 2008

A farewell to 2008

2008 is going to an end with a spotless sun. This prolonged minimum is very annoying indeed. I hope that sooner or later sun will wake up and do its duty. By the way we have results for EPC PSK63 party 2008. Very big scores! Too many participants as the active members are more than 5000. No chance to get a descent place. I just got the first place in Greece. Not a big deal. But let forget all as the post is to wish you a Happy New year 2009 with a lot of radio activity, many dx and happy contesting time!

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

My Racal Ampligard Headset

A few days ago I found this piece of surplus in eBay. I bided it and finally got it. Nice equipment from the past. I wired it for YAESU, no big deal, and I put it on the air. It works perfectly. Well, it needs a bit more mice gain and the transmit audio is a bit of small bandwidth but no other problem. It is a proper headset for contesting or other heavy traffic operations in SSB. In construction it looks like a Roll Royce vs a sevy, compared with the trendy Heill sets. It is really amazing how they were manufacturing such things in the past.

Monday, December 1, 2008

CQ WW CW TEST

Last weekend of November! The CQ WW CW contest keeps alive the radio amateur bands. I am not really fond of CW mode. I never hid my love for the digital modes, mostly PSK. On the other hand with SCIMMER and so many decoders in our disposal, CW became just another digital mode. Still it remains the only one that human brain can decode. What machine can not handle, brain helps and the one confirms the other. So the game becomes more interesting, at least for guys like me who are not skilled cwers. With these thoughts in mind I decided to join the test this year. My tool was the MixW2, updated to the v2.19 beta. It run all the contest faultlessly.
I made more than 2 hundred QSO. I worked easily rare DX entities that otherwise it would be very difficult to work. I give you a small list: PJ2T, D4C, KP2M, HC8N, B1Z, AH2T, 3X5A, 5H3EE, 9J3A. Also I worked many stations from USA, Japan and Africa. I spent a really great time. Well maybe my score was low but I had a great time... and I found out that finally my dicision was right.