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.
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.
TA MF has been very poor the last few days though some dxers have been getting some good results in the afternoons to Asia – see JF’s blog – http://skegnessdx.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/skegness-log-19-10-13-mw.html
Here in London 10m has been quite open and I worked my 264 DXCC yesterday – FK8DD Sam in French New Caledonia – http://www.corail.nc/FK8DD/index.html
Today I played around on 10m AM using my Icom 756 PROII to drive my Acom 1000 amplifier. Antenna was the 1/2 G5RV as stormy conditions in London meant I kept the Tennamast down so was not using the Cushcraft mini-beam MA5B. Had a nice QSO with VE3FGU in Keswick Ontario – http://www.qrz.com/db/VE3FGU The pint-size G5RV is not a bad performer on 10m (or 40m) though it is pretty poor on the other bands. The AM portion of the band is from 29.0 – 29.1 MHz.
Other DX worked on 28 MHz (10m band== 28 MHz) over the weekend included KG4HF with rtty in Guantanamo Bay and an ssb contact with JW9JKA Svalbard island.