ILLW coming up

Coming up this weekend in the International Lighthouse and Lightship Weekend.   This event is sponsored by the AYR Amateur Radio Group in Scotland, and they have been running it since 1993.

This year I will be activating Pig Point Lighthouse on Amherst Island, a light which has never been activated before, so hopefully the propagation and weather Gods will cooperate with each other and allow us to have a great day on Saturday at the light.

I'll be using the usual Lighthouse frequencies and using the VE3FI callsign.

Sunday QRP'ing

Jim VE3ULC in todays operating tent.

It was a beautiful day here in Eastern Ontario, in fact it was warm enough to go on out to our Field Day site.....which is now no longer under water, but still real soggy in some spots.....and play some portable QRP radio.

The bands were not in too bad a condition.  The propagation numbers as of 1757 UTC, 13 August were:   SFI=70, SN=11, A Index=11, and the K Index=2.

The was the usual stuff going on, tuning up over QSO's and LIDS a plenty.  Lots of European stations were on 20m, I tried to work 9A3ON in Croatia, and SV9NNK in Crete.  Both stations copied VE3Fox......but couldn't get the "Italy" at the end of the callsign no matter what phonetic I used....so they're not in the log.

I did manage to have solid QSO's with EI8BLB in Ireland, and EG8HKT in the Canary Islands, both of which made my day.   Not too shabby for 5 watts into an MFJ 17' collapsible whip antenna with one 17' elevated counterpoise.

Next weekend we're off to activate the Pig Point Lighthouse on Amherst Island for the ILLW weekend.  We'll be QRO for that event with the FT-897D.

It was a WSPRing type day.....

Not much going on at the homestead yesterday so I did a bit of WSPRing after cutting the grass.  I haven't been on WSPR for a few weeks as my computer developed a disliking to that program.......

Propagation as of 2242 UTC, 11 August, was:  SFI=69.  SN=11.  A Index=8 and the K Index=3.

Here's my 20m map:

Not too shabby, signals getting out to either end of the earth, from Eureka, Nunavut, to Australia, and New Zealand.   Very pleased with this.   Antenna is a 148 foot inverted L long wire up at 50' and my FT-817ND at 500mw.

An interesting Go-Box

Jim - VE3ULC brought his recently built go-box over to my QTH yesterday so he could check it and a newly built OCF dipole out.

The finished box

Interesting piece of kit, he's built it into a small Pelican Case and it has a FT-817, speaker, a Raspberry Pi, a small hi-def screen, and enough battery power to last a week.

He's built a lightweight 40m OCF dipole to go with this kit, and we put it up 25 feet into one of my tall trees to test it out.   Putting the analyzer on it first we found it was very good on all bands.....including 2m...... but it will not tune at all on 15m.

We ran it through several bands on various digital modes and it works just great on all of them.   Next Friday we plan on getting out to one of the local parks and doing some portable work with our gear, and hopefully Jim's gear will pass and exceed our expectations.

Jim VE3ULC on the miniature key pad.

Don - VE3MNE supervising our testing

Rumour Control.........

Hmmm.......rumour has it that the VE3FI Van will be heading to the west coast again next year in May.

I wonder how many 2m repeaters I won't get a response from in 2018???  It was pretty dismal in 2014 when I drove across, and I imagine with the growth of the digital repeaters it has become even more dismal....but we shall see.

Not sure of the route yet......but it won't be via the Trans-Canada, but I have decided to do the northern route through Ontario.  I've driven the Lake Superior route three times now so it's time for a change.

I'll post more details as I solidify my plans.