After years of successfully keeping my Topband vertical in service during winter storms in costal environment my streak of luck has finally come to an end. This season alone I had more problems with the Topband vertical than in the past 10 years. Heres a quick recap of the so far very eventful season at
It seems like CQWW CW will be a single band effort! The Topband Vertical a SE0X didn’t even make it through the first storm of the season. This week it was discovered to be resting on the ground after a few days of rough weather with storm. One of the guy line supports didn’t hold
The skimmer receiver at SE0X has been offline a few weeks. Some of the local species find RG6 coaxial cable delicious. Our 100 meter coax was temporarily repaired this past winter after being chewed off. This summer when replacing the coax, I found deep cuts caused by animals in several places were the coax crosses
Challenged by the QRM picked up by my omni directional active RX vertical when trying to work TL8TT on Topband, I decided it was time for a directional RX antenna pointing south in addition to my N/W and N/E Pennants. I had a transformer and termination resistors collecting dust so I decided to throw out some wire to make a short BOG,
CQ 160 is one of my favourite contests. The goal this year was set to break the SM record in SO-HP Assisted. In addition I also wanted to beat my own score from 2010 in SO-HP (unassisted). Reasonably well prepared, somewhat rested and with the gear in shape I was ready to take on the
The Elecraft K3 transceiver at SE0X is an early first batch model. It was ordered within days from the K3 announcement at the Visalia DX convention 10 years ago. Many improvements has been introduced over the years and most of them have been implemented in our K3.
Our CW skimmer is finally online again after a series of both software and hardware problems. It all started with with Windows automatically upgrading to Win 10 which lead to network problems. The WiFi link was replaced with Ubiquity equipment which seemed to cure the problem.
Why am I always working on antennas in November, right at the start of the wet and windy season! Doing antenna work at @SE0X in the first snow storm of the season. 112 km/h (31 m/s) wind yesterday. pic.twitter.com/vdgzTDWfvp — SM0MDG (@SM0MDG) November 3, 2016 Posted the above video on Twitter. I have to
Earlier this month I was logging more than one thousand contacts in the IARU HF contest using an SDR transceiver. In this blog post I will share my experiences of this modern approach to contesting.
The IARU HF Contest this past year was a lot of fun despite the bad band conditions. More than 1000 QSOs where logged in 22 hours of operating time. Here is a short summary with results.