Had a great time participating the ARRL Roundup RTTY 2014! Began with a good start, quit a few runs on 40m. Then switching to 80m, the ZS6BKW works excellent! With 261 Q’s in the log I went for bed around 0:00 local time. Again in the shack this morning around 6:30 am. I was doing all right when 20m opened up. Around 9:30 am I got another message from the neighbor 🙁 Again RFI in his pc monitor. So the ZS6BKW did help against that.. So I was forced to enter the QRP-section, running 5 watts. I must say, I’m amazed how many Q’s are still possible with only 5 watts. You have to call a few times more, but most of what you hear, you’re able to work!
Just turning off the power of my nice hand warm TS-590 (10:00 pm). 400 Q’s in the log, 45 DXCC and 26.000 points. Don’t you just love RTTY?
Tag: 80m
Another antenna
After earlier issues with my Fritzel FD-3 and the fact it is not able to do 80m (which is a serious handicap with most contests) made me search for yet another antenna solution.
Wilko PA3BWK (from who I did loose the division league) dropped by te other day. He did inspect my setup and advised me to use a ZS6BKW antenna. My problem with not being able to stretch out twice the same length of wire from both sides of my chimney could be solved when I let the feeding point float in the air and put one wire over the mast.
That way I’m able to put 2x 13,75 meter and feed it with 12,2 meters of 450-ohm ladder line.
Fred PA3YH sponsored me with some left over antenna wire from his antenna project and I found some open ladder line from one of my earlier own antenna projects.
I’m still optimizing the new setup. I put down my beautiful white mast for now and put up a slightly longer mast for the ZS6BKW. That means my 2m/70cm Diamond is down for the moment. But I guess not for long.
This time of year isn’t very nice to do antenna experiments. Lots of rain, strong winds and it’s cold. But I can’t wait for spring, that way I loose to many Q’s!
WSPR on 80m
Last night I leave WSPR on for the whole night to see what happen. According to propagation rules, the best opportunities on 80m should be around the greyline. In the evening that means in western Europe I should get signals out of the east and in the morning I should get signals out of the west. A little disappointed I was this morning when the only thing I saw is stations from Europe. Could it be my antenna? Bad propagation on 80m? Not enough WSPR-station on the air? I guess my S9 noise level on 80m don’t help much.