One of my Aims this year was to try to have at least one on air QSO per day. Now obviously there will be times when this is not possible, but for last month at least I achieved it. No DX I’m afraid but then it seems to be that conditions in April did not seem as good as those in March. There are no contacts on 15metres in last months log, but there were quite a few for the previous month.
Apart from the occasional 40 metres SSB contact the vast majority of my operating has been on PSK31 on either 17 or 30 metres and locall on 2 and 4 metres FM. The image above is of Adam M6RDP’s EQSL card, received following a very enjoyable 40 metres QSO in April.
Lets home the new month will bring an improvement in HF conditions and maybe some good weather too! I have a few antenna related jobs to do- my Hygain AV12 vertical needs some adjustment for 20 metres, where the SWR is a little high. I also may try and improve the wire antenna I have been using for inter G working on 40 metres, but as Julian G4ILO points out I run the risk of the “Improvement” being a step backwards!
In The meantime I have been looking again at the difference in performance between the HF rigs I have here. I have the Yaesu FT1000MP, Trio TS830S, Kenwood TS450S and the Yaesu 857D. The 857 however at the moment is only in use on VHF/UHF. I will elaborate in a later post about this but at the moment, as far as I am concerned the TS830s has the nicest receiver of them all. In fact this Twenty odd year old rig would give any piece of modern gear a run for its money.
I was tempted to buy a TS830S when I saw one in nice condition being sold on eBay a while ago. After checking the dimensions I realized that my tiny boxroom shack is just too small for boat anchors.
ReplyDeleteI am a little limited for space in my shack too! But there is no way I would get rid of the 830. I must admit though in comparison to the "shack in a box" rigs like the Yaesu 857 it is a bit of a monster.
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