EPC PSK63 PARTY

This week end I joined the party of European PSK Club. I spent a nice time. Furthermore I never hid my love to digital modes. Even though the propagation was low, I made 500 qso mostly with EPC members and just a few dx. Spiros, SV8CS, just a couple of years ago, took the first place with 451 qso. But the situation has change since then. The members now are more than 5000 and I am afraid that my five hundred qso are not enough for a leading place. Any way I dad a lot of fun ruining the party. Among contacts were members from America Australia Japan and Africa. Well the club is spreading. Last year I had 400 qso but I unfortunately lost my log due to technical problems. Some people lost some points because of that and I feel sorry. But this time my log came safely to the contest manager. Long Live PSK!

Global Tuners

Global tuners is a well known site with receivers from all around the world that you can control through the internet. Recently, among the other receivers two Greek ones added. So you can find in the list SV2BWM and SV1BTL stations, available most of the time. In the picture you see the second one tuned in 15m, listening VQ9RD. Beyond the fun, using such a station it is an excellent tool chasing a DX, as you can check where it is heard in real time. Cluster does the same job but with much less fun regardless it does not say always the truth. I really cannot understand people who refuge using technology to extend their possibilities. It is so exciting.

Sniffing VK9DWX

This morning, even with a blank sun, propagation turned out to be favorite to work VK8DWX in 12m band. Suddenly it occurred to me to open CW Skimmer to sniff its transmission. Excellent tool, as you can in the snap. Even with 3KHz spacing it could copy almost all activity. Some people are sceptic about what machines can do. Some other, among them and me, they just use them.

DX came back

The 24th cycle seems that accelerates during the last days. Two groups of sunspots simultaneously...that's great news indeed. This alone it would be just an interesting statistical event. I do not know if there is any connection but a lot of DX stations are heard recently. T33Z, 5U5U, 9L1X, D44AC, TO5DX, C56YK, TN5SN, and of course VK9DWX. The last one is a major DXpedition organized by BCC and delivers big signals in any band or mode. So I can claim for sure that DX came back. Enjoy it.

Talking to Mitchel

The 10m band is open more frequently last days. Is that a sign of emerging 24th cycle? We would like to believe so. Anyway, in such an opening this afternoon I had a QSO with a station ZU6M in 28.495MHz. His name was Mitchel and his voice was very delicate. So during the QSO I was tempted to take a look to qrz.com to get some info for my interlocutor. And suddenly I realized that I was talking to an 11 years old boy from South Africa. What a nice surprise indeed! I felt like this young gentleman was ready to get the baton from me. And I would be very glad to give it to him. It was really one of most distinctive moments of my amateur career and very difficult to forget. What else are going to bring us cycle 24?

Wow!....What a test

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....

Autumn

Heavy weather above my antenna system. Autumn is here. We had the first thunderstorm of the season with 60mm of rain just in a few hours. It was very welcomed of course after 4 tedious quite dry months. Fortunately I had no casualties in the shack.
But the event that sealed the start of Autumn was my 60th birthday and the present of my XYL, SW8KOJ: a lovely TM-D710. Thank you very much my dear and many Happy Returns to come and share.