M0JCQ's Ham Blog ← Adventures in Ham Radio ← Page 2

2m Contesting from a SOTA Summit (Video) 7

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 4

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) 4

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 ...

Icom 7300 Contest Keyer 1

Oct

15

2018

I’ve recently been building out my contesting capabilities at home and I’ve just added the SOTABEAMS ContestConsole to my shack. I’m also going to receive the K1EL K44 CW Keyer & Reader, for use in CW contests. But here I will focus on the ContestConsole. SOTABEAMS have continued to impress me with their innovations. I’ve been ...

Building the DX Commander Lite multi-band vertical 6

Oct

3

2018

The other week I was casually researching how to make a multi-band vertical for the HF bands, initially I was thinking of a single length of wire, with traps, to separate the bands. My primary reason for wanting a vertical was to work a bit more DX, taking advantage of the low angle takeoff offered ...

FT8 – A personal critique 23

Sep

22

2018

FT8 (or Franke-Taylor design, 8-FSK modulation) has taken the amateur bands by storm and for better or for worse, it’s changed the profile of activity since it launched in 2017. It doesn’t garner universal love from the amateur community, in fact it seems to polarise us; you either love it or you hate it. I ...