The Weekend Round-Up

What a great weekend on the bands! The ARRL International SSB Contest certainly brought hams out of the woodwork and on the air.

When I looked at the SFI numbers on Thursday to see what was going on, I thought we would all be twiddling our thumbs on Saturday and Sunday, but instead it turned around and the conditions where pretty good after all.

40m didn’t make me smile very much; I only managed to make a total of four contacts on that band all weekend long. I was hearing lots of stations, the problem was nobody was calling “CQ Contest”, and nobody was answering my CQ calls either. Both 20m and 15m sort of got left behind in the rush that was 10m. I made 31 contacts on 20m, 30 contacts on 15m, and 261 contacts on 10m.

Furthest contact of the weekend was with JA2AXB in Shizuoko City, Japan on 10m.

The Band Police must have taken the weekend off as I didn’t hear any of them about all weekend. However, there is one gentleman, and I really do use that term loosely, who spent a couple of hours Saturday afternoon jamming contesters on 14.235. Apparently it was his personal frequency and he objected most strongly to anyone who got close. His foul mouth and racist rants had to be heard to be believed. I hope somebody caught his callsign and managed to tape him so the FCC can also hear him. He certainly doesn’t deserve to be a ham with his attitude.

Let’s all hope the last weekend of the month is just as good for the CQ WW WPX SSB Contest.

ARRL International SSB DX Contest

Coming up in two weeks is the ARRL International SSB DX Contest.  Contest runs from 0000Z, March 1st  to 2400Z, March 2nd.

Looking forward to getting back on the air, both HF antennas seem to have survived the long winter we have had this year, and are both working well. 

Looking at my logbook entries for last years contest it seemed that the European stations were in the majority on the Saturday, and the South Americans and Caribbean stations were the majority on Sunday, We’ll see if it’s the same this year.



 

Trying another way to publish in this blog

 

This is a test posting using Windows Live Writer

AND……..obviously we have a winner   So we will continue to use this blog now that we have the picture posting issue fixed.

Posting Issues

Has anyone else had trouble trying to upload pictures to their Blogs on Blogger?  For some reason I can no longer do this. 


I can post text....obviously, but no pictures at all, no matter what format I try them in.


HELP !! :-)

Kidney Stones...

No operating in the NA QSO Party today for me.  I'm out for the count with a bout of kidney stones.  I thought I might be able to handle it, but the pain is pretty bad and sitting around just makes it worse.  Good luck to all who take part!

Hopefully this will be over in a few days......until then we just keep trying to smile!

2014 Plans.......

Trees to hang antennas - Check!
Salt water - Check!

Well another year has come and we're off for another rollicking 12 months of ham radio fun....but what fun to have?

Like most of you reading this the expense of doing a major DXpedition is really out of the question, but with so much money tied up in equipment you have to do something or SWMBO might get upset!   So what to do?

I've decided that first up will be the activation of three local islands, two of which I have not activated before, ON-175 Block House Island in Brockville, and ON-177 Treasure Island in Gananoque.  I'll also finally attempt a first time activation of Upper Brewers Mill Island, just south of Seeley's Bay.

I'm also going to activate a couple of lighthouses.  The first one will be CAN-815 Portsmouth Harbour Light, which has not been activated within living memory from what the local hams tell me, and then off to CAN-767 Prescott to activate the harbour light there.

These are what I'm going to call "micro-dxpeditions"

Of course sitting here watching the winds blow the loose snow across my backyard as Kingston suffers in a bone chilling -37C with the wind chill, a major DXpedition to Fiji looks pretty good right about now......and damn the expense!

RAC Winter Contest - The Results!

Well, Bob, VA3QV is no longer that elusive!!  He was my 10th contact of the night, caught him hanging around on 80m SSB.  It was a very hard contact to complete, he was truly about a 41 and he was way down in the mud, but we managed to complete the QSO.  Made my day !!

Friday night was a pretty hard struggle, lots of noise on the band, and of course the antennas were still coated with thick ice making tuning "interesting".  However, over night the temperature rose to a balmy +2C by 0300, and by 0700 it was sitting at +3C.  The end result was the ice melted, the trees sprung back, and my dipole ended up about 15' higher by morning than I started with.....all good news.

Saturday morning with the dipole back up at 50', the contacts started to come on a regular basis with 20m being the band of choice to start.  The morning and afternoon was spent switching back and forth between 10m, 15m, and 20m depending on conditions and the very deep QSB that was going on. 

About 1700 local the bands started to change and I switched to 40m, bouncing every now and then to 80m.  I even managed a couple of 160m contacts, not bad for QRP on an 80m OCF dipole!

I managed to work just about all the multipliers, but saw no sign of the VO2's or VY0's.  So obviously that lone ham in Nunavut is back in Florida for the winter!

Summary sheet:

2m SSB – 1 contact VE3

6m SSB – 2 contacts VE3

10m SSB- 11 contacts VE5, VE6, VE7, VE8

15m SSB- 8 contacts VE4, VE5, VE6, VE7, VE8

20m SSB- 25 contacts VE1, VE3, VE4, VE5, VE6, VE7, VE9, VY1, VY2

40 SSB- 17 contacts VE2, VE3, VE4, VE6, VE7, VE9

80m SSB- 21 contacts VE1, VE2, VE3, VE6, VE9, VO1, VY2

160m SSB- 2 contacts VE3

All in all it was a great time, and I bettered my score from last year.  Next on the calendar is the NA QSO Party on the 18/19 January.

RAC Winter Contest

The 2013 RAC winter contest kicks off on the 28th of December, 0000Z and runs until 2400Z.  Most years I do not contest this one very seriously, but I'm going to give it a good try this year.  Hopefully I'll get the ever elusive VA3QV in the log this year !

I tested the ice covered antennas last night and managed a good QSO with Mark, SQ2GXO in Gdansk, Poland.  They seem to be working and tuning well on all bands.  Hopefully with the +1C heat wave we had today, even more ice will have been lost.

Hope to work you all on the bands tonight.