This month I started a Virtual Build-a-thon with Chertsey Radio Club…we’re building a Foxx-3 and K16 keyer combo from Kanga UK as a virtual group simply using videos and group Webex sessions once a week. It’s brilliant fun and a great way to meet lots of new people.
Straight key week came and went with almost no contacts this year. From the shack I used my lovely Marconi copy but the shack is often just a few degrees in temperature at this time of the year so I moved back indoors to operate from my bed! Operating the Air Ministry’s Type D on […]
As a SOTA enthusiast I’m aways looking for mays to minimise the size of my station and had experimented with End Fed Half Wave (EFHW) aerials in the past but with a matching unit that included an inductor and a variable capacitor I found it super sensitive to the proximity of the ground, trees and […]
As the month draws to an end this marks the end of my 8 week CW Ops training course. It’s seen an amazing change in my ability through a fundamental change to the way I ‘do’ CW. Although I still have a lot of practice ahead to improve the percentage of copy I’m already more […]
This month I rediscovered my Elecraft K1, a little gem of a radio and the first quality kit that genuinely gave me a fully featured and high performing CW transceiver. When I originally built it I had aerials for 80m & 20m so I built it to cover these two bands. Now I almost exclusively operate […]
James (M0JCQ) convinced me that a rerun of our 2015 Five Peaks SOTA challenge would be an excellent idea…after all, Winter in Wales, what could possibly go wrong. This year we chose the half-term holiday weekend so finding overnight digs on the Friday was a challenge. We activated the following summits on the English/Welsh border in […]
To wrap up 2015 I was super chuffed to get my EUCW Snakes and Ladders certificate from Martin (IK2RMZ/DL1GBZ). This has been a great activity for me as a QRPer as I can compete on an equal footing with QRO Ops. Check out EUCW Snakes & Ladders.
A little quite on the radio front for the last few weeks but hope to be active over Christmas from Abercastle in south west Wales. If you hear me signing /A I’m in a little cottage at the waters edge (QRA: IO71kx, WAB: SM83, nearest Post Code: SA62 5HJ).This month I built and tested the […]
Propagation, which has been pretty poor all Summer, continues to thwart all attempts to play radio so I’ve started a bit of construction working on a Minima Transceiver as designed by Ashhar Farhan (VU2ESE). This is mainly thanks to Alex (G7KSE) who sent me a couple of swanky PCBs for this project. Thanks dude…In addition […]
My Icom IC7400 has developed a fault so it’s time to pack it up and get it shipped off to the menders. This has made a huge space on the desk so I thought I’d fill that with a new (2nd hand) Youkits HB-1B courtesy of Dave (G0AYD) as I love miniature CW transceivers. Here you can […]