The last weekend of September, except for a farewell of summer,it has a different meaning for me. Yes, it is the famous CQ WW RTTY contest! It became a tradition to join this great ham event every year. This time it was quite exciting and full of surprises. To say the truth I am not interested in the competition but I really love the game.
BTW a storm is approaching..let me unplug the antennas. Autumn is here.
As the summer is going by, a new band emerged. Two Greek stations, SV8CS and SV3DVO are transmitting on 136KHz almost every night. It is a band given to us recently. So there is a lot of space for experimentation. Here is a receiving report of these stations in OPERA 8 mode using an active mini whip antenna.
On the other the hand traditional bands are not going well. Propagation is unstable and usually suffering of strong QSB. The 24 sun cycle is turned out to be the faintest for one hundred years. The diagram shows the big deference with the recent cycles 21, 22 and 23. The comparison is disappointing.
There are rumors that the next cycle will be very faint as well. What a pity. Unfortunately, it seems that the golden era of radio is over.
