I had a play in last weekend’s major CQ WW CW contest – staying on 10m all the time. Goal was to work as many DXCC and CQ zones as I could. I ended up with 28 zones and 79 DXCC worked. The link below shows the QSOs graphically:
Gear was Icom 756ProII/Cushcraft MA5B mini-beam at 9m and Writelog software for rig control, cw decoding and keying.
A welcome bit of publicity for the blog from Chrissy Brand in December 2013 Radio User magazine. Below is photocopy of page 60:
There is a good mention for my old mucker John Faulkner’s interesting MF/Band II blog as well. JF is also name checked on page 32 in Garry Smith’s “dxtv and satellite news” section along with another good friend of the blog renowned Band II tropo dxer Nick Gilly.
After almost a month of very poor or non-existent NA DX conditions came back this week down south (Scottish dxers saw a return last week). On 25 November at 0629 I had a personal first – XEARZ-AM Zer Radio was coming into London on 1650 kHz with easy listening music and “Zer Radio 16-50” ids as can be seen below:
Finally, a welcome back home to Paul C after his hospital stay. Take it easy Paul but keep those dx-ears of yours available!
The ultra-rare AM pirate Radio Britannia from Barnsley South Yorkshire was heard in London tonight between 20-21.00 UTC. Signal was weak but readable and the the video below shows how it was sounding:
Equipment in use was the Perseus SDR and the 10x5m Flag orientated at 300 degrees.
Hard rocking and propagating well into London this early afternoon.
The station is run by students of the Moscow Technical University of Communications and Informatics (MTUCI). Rig is the Perseus SDR with 10x5m Flag antenna. Home-brew bi-monocular balun is used with 10:3 ratio of turns with 24 swg magnet wire. The balun performs really well at MF and extends up to 26 MHz and beyond.