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.
Some beautiful weather in Carcassonne last week with temperatures up to 28C! The MUF (maximum usable frequency) obliged as well and several NA and SA utility comms were heard between 29.7 and 40.0 MHz.
Here’s 33.6 MHz at 1515 UTC on 30 October 2013:
High MUF 39.040 MHz 15:20 UTC 30 October 2013 – sounds Brazilian
33.78 MHz at 15:29 UTC 30 October 2013:
and 33.74 MHz at 1517 UTC 1 November 2013:
SFI was getting up to 160 and above last week and it’s great to see the F2 propagation bring in some interesting DX.
Equipment used was the Icom 9100 in NFM with 12 kHz filter and Cushcraft R8 vertical. Audio fed out of icom into Acer laptop mic input and recorded with the versatile freeware Audacity.
As expected autumnal F2 propagation has returned to London with MUFs up to 35 MHz. Below is how the Orlando weather station WQIN663 on 33.42 MHz was sounding yesterday afternoon at 17.20. Rig is the versatile Uniden UBC800XLT controlled by bcTool and antenna is a simple horizontal 35 MHz dipole in an apple tree.
I like bcTool (http://www.bctool.org/) as it logs and records each time the squelch is broken. The audio below is mainly continuous though is a really a montage of six individual recordings as the squelch dropped with signal fades. I used Audacity to combine the wave files from bcTool and then export as mp3.