Category: Propagation

Posts that are related to propagation and conditions.

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JARTS WW RTTY 2013 scoreThis weekend I was all prepared for the JARTS WW RTTY contest. Propagation is great at the moment, around 9 am 10 meters is wide open. Saturday morning around 5:30 I was in the shack making QSO’s. Balancing between family time and contesting the whole weekend, Sunday evening at 10 o-clock I was done with it. With 303 QSO’s in the log the contest was done for me. Finally I’ve worked a great deal of Japanese stations (even on 15 meters were my FD-3 isn’t resonant) and some other new DXCC’s like Hong Kong, United Arabic Emirates and a few I didn’t have yet.
My set-up works great on 20, 15 and 10 meters. On 40 meters I must power down to around 20 watts to not have too much RFI in the shack. My homemade FSK-cable is not working at higher power levels and my keyboard is going nuts causing N1MM doing all kind of crazy things.
I think the shack is a little too close under the antenna. The fact that I don’t have a earthed wall outlet in my shack don’t help either I guess.

I’ve got to find out how to fix this before the next contest (coming weekend, CQ WW SSB). Nice quest for this week!

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Today I participated in the Makrothen RTTY 2013 contest. I didn’t want to sit upstairs for several hours, so I walked the transceiver and all other stuff downstairs and enter the contest from the dinning table in the living room.
My initial plan was to enter the contest for a hour or so and make 30 or 40 QSO’s. But propagation was quite good and my brand new FD-3 wire antenna on it’s new mast performed very well! Even on 10 meters I contacted one American after another. Got two new DXCC: Guantanamo Bay and Republic of the Congo! After about six hours I made 100 QSO’s.

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wsprWeak Signal Propagation Reporter (WSPR, pronounced:” whisper”) is a protocol developed by John Taylor, K1JT in 2008. It’s one of the many protocols used by radio amateurs but WSPR is a special one. The “Weak Signal”-part refers to signals being transmitted with a maximum power of 5 Watt (37 dBm), what still is regarded as QRP. But you can use much less then 5 Watt. Use more power is pointless, because it removes the accuracy of the “Propagation Continue reading →