James Stevens ← M0JCQ's Ham Blog

Building a Cobweb Antenna and Testing it with NanoVNA [with video]

Jul

23

2020

Recently I decided to take down my Western HF-10 multi band dipole, actually scrap that, a fox did the work for me and chewed through the kevlar guy ropes supporting it. They saved me a job really – just in a slightly less elegant way! I’d contemplated a Cobweb antenna for some time, they have ...

SOTA Activation of Snowdon in the Snow (Highest Mountain in Wales) 1

Nov

30

2019

During November me and two friends met up and travelled up to Snowdonia for a weekend of hill walking. The forecast had been for heavy rain throughout (pretty common for Snowdonia!), but come Saturday morning we were awoken to a glorious blanket of snow. As we ate our full Welsh breakfast in the cafe, we ...

2m SOTA Pile Up Video on Red Screes

Oct

11

2019

While on holiday in the Lake District, I visited the SOTA summit of Red Screes (G/LD-017) for a 2m SSB contest. While there I also activated it for SOTA using 2m FM, here’s the resulting pile-up using 25 watts and a vertical Moxon:

2m Contesting from a SOTA Summit (Video) 5

Oct

3

2019

While on holiday in the Lake District I decided to try a spot of VHF contesting from one of the many SOTA summmits in the area. I chose the SOTA summit of Red Screes (G/LD-017, 6 points) and operated in the RSGB 2m Backpackers contest. The video shows my experience and live QSOs:

Magic Band Contesting Setup 3

Sep

22

2019

Back in June I took part in the Worked All Britain 6m contest alongside the RSGB 6m Trophy. I shot a video showing my portable contesting setup for the 6m band, alongside some summertime Sporadic-E DX. It also features a special time lapse of the station tear down at the end 🙂

VHF Contesting with the ICOM 9700 (with video) 2

Jun

1

2019

Each year me and Phil M0NVS get involved with the RSGB 2m Backpackers series of contests. 2019 is no exception and while we don’t have any chance of winning it, we do always enjoy it! We like to do as well as we can, but are limited by the relatively small hills here in IO91. ...

Activating Mallorca’s Second Highest Mountain (with video) 8

May

27

2019

While on a hiking holiday recently I was able to activate a number of SOTA summits on the Balearic island of Mallorca (IOTA EU-004). I was there with my YL (Christina) and we had set our sights on Mallorca’s second highest mountain (Massanella – EA6/MA-002). All activations were secondary to the actual hiking, so no ...

Californian SOTA Activation – Mount Davidson (W6/NC-423) 1

Dec

21

2018

Work recently took me back to California, and specifically to San Francisco, which I’d not visited before. Naturally enough I checked the nearby SOTA summits to see if I could sneak in an activation. Mount Davidson (W6/NC-423) seemed to fit the bill nicely, it’s easy to get to with public transport, not too much of ...

VHF Tropo Opening (November 2018) 3

Nov

26

2018

I’d been watching the tropo forecast with anticipation for the 17th-18th of November 2018 and had planned to go out portable to see what I could work on 2m VHF. In the morning I’d had a scan on 2m from home (using a Diamond V2000 colinear) and I could see conditions were up, as I ...

Worked All Britain Awards so far 2

Oct

25

2018

Of late I’ve been focussing on working stations across the UK for the various Worked All Britain (WAB) awards, for me this adds some incentive to work local stations on both HF and VHF. It’s especially convenient as I spend more time working with NVIS and ground-wave propagation than I do regular F layer DX. I’ve ...