The bands were certainly not in the best of shape over the weekend with large solar flares and CME's screaming towards us, but it was still a good weekend DXing......well, any weekend is good if you can spend it chasing DX!
The new FT-950 certainly helped, I'm amazed at the performance of this rig. The ATU will not handle the mismatch, so I now have a MFJ-949E manual tuner in line with the rig so I can tune up my 40m OCF on 15m and 17m. Works like a charm.
The hard thing to remember is to put the tuner back on "bypass" so the ATU can work once I have finished on 15m and 17m. So far I haven't screwed up.
This weekend I managed to put 8 DX contacts, including another two new countries in the log. This weekends catch was:
PJ7PT in Sint Maartin on 10m.
ZD7FT in Jamestown, St. Helena on 17m.
And on 15m I worked:
CO8LY in Santiago de Cuba.
F4DSD in St. Martin de Crau, France.
CT9/RC5A on Madeira Island.
HA5JI in Budapest, Hungary.
IZ5HPQ in Toscany, Italy, and
ER4DX in Otaci, Moldova.
I'm pretty confident that I'll do quite well during the CQ SSB DX Contest at the end of the month......hopefully the bands will improve before then.
Great DX contacts considering the solar conditions at this time. As for the rig when I have to make sure certain conditions have to be met before I transmit I find a post it note in the rig area helps.
ReplyDeleteHi Mike,
DeleteI've a little notebook that I've been filling with notes and it certainly does help. It also contains a list of frequencies and appropriate settings for the manual tuner which helps speed things up.