Snow!

Pictured is how my HF doublet looked first thing this morning! Covered in snow which had fallen overnight (as foercasted) and the wire sagging badly. South Wales has seen some heavy snow in the past 24hours making travelling difficult. So no work for me today!
A quick shake of the antenna feeder got rid of the snow by the way and the antenna is back to normal.
So today I have some extra time and have started reorganising the shack.

60 Metres

Today I applied online for a notice of Variation to my licence to enable me to operate on 60 metres. The NOV was granted seconds after applying so it seems the intention is now to grant an NOV to any full licence holders that wish it.
The NOV gives us in the UK 11 frequencies that can be used on 5mhz.
Interestingly enough initial experiments show that this is one band that my Western HF10 doublet doesnt like - tuning is extremely tricky even with an external ATU. Although keeping the power down seems to improve matters.  It seems if I want to use this band I am going to need to rig up an alternative antenna.

Shortwave Listening.

I managed to do quite a bit of shortwave listening over the past weekend and have been putting my new SDR4+ receiver through its paces. Rather than clog up this post with my ramblings about my new toy you can click here to find out a bit more about it.
Suffice it to say I am rather impressed with this little rig!

Christmas is coming.....

Well in my shack anyway! An early Christmas present in the form of an SDR shortwave radio. This is the Cross Country Wireless SDR4+ which I received last week.

It covers from around 900Khz to 30 Mhz and so far I am very impressed. In the main I have been using the SDR-Radio Software to control the radio.

I have even managed to set the radio up so I can remotely tune and listen to it over the internet. If you visit SDRSPACE.COM and down load the software you will see a number of receivers that you can remotely use. Mine isnt on 24/7 at the moment though.

I will write further on the SDR4+ soon but for now I am enjoying tuning the bands with it.

Latest Addition

Latest addition to the shack is an "Isoterm Multicon USB" soundcard interface for PSK/DATA etc wired for my FT1000MP. Whilst I dont find the FT1000MP ideal for data modes it does allow me to clear a bit of space on the desk as the Kenwood FT450 I was using as a dedicated Data modes rig can now become a backup rig.
I am very Impressed with the construction of the unit and once I had downloaded the right driver for it all was quickly up and running. Trying a bit of PSK on 10 metres, running around 20 watts  resulted in QSOs with VE3FGU and LU3CM.

40 Metres

A pleasant evening in the shack tonight. I had a couple of hours to spend and ended up having a few nice QSOs on 40 metres SSB.
I had a nice surprise when just as I was about to close down I was called by PC4T, fellow blogger Paul.
Its always nice to have a QSO with one of my Blog friends.
So thanks for calling in Paul. It was great to work you. Lets hope its the first QSO of many.

Antenna update

The "Western HF 10" antenna I recently install came with an information sheet recommending that it is installed with a centre support. At my QTH I have a small mast mounted on the back of the house and another at the end of my garden. In other words-no central support. The antenna although in itself lightweight has quite a large balun at the end of the 450 ohm ladderline.

 I quickly found that if the balun was left hanging freely it put too much strain on the coax cable going into the balun. The result was the cable was pulled out of the PL259 connector requiring re-soldering.

I have now installed a short support pole underneath the feedpoint of the balun and anchored the balun and the coax to it-that appears to have solved the problem.

I am very impressed with the antenna. It can be operated without an ATU on a portion of 80 metres and 20 and a large portion of 10 metres also. On the other bands down to 80 metres the internal ATU in my rig tunes it easily.The antenna seems very lively, especially on the higher bands. It will tune on 160 metres using an external ATU but signals on that band seem very low (The antenna is far too short for the band) and I think that anything other than local contacts on 160 would be unlikely.
It has coped well with the 300+ watts I have occasionally used when trying out the borrowed vintage KW1000 linear amplifier I have in the shack at the moment.

 As an added bonus this antenna seems very useful as a general shortwave listening antenna. I have hooked it up to my R5000 receiver and had some good results from around 3Mhz up to 30. On medium wave it does seem a little "deaf" obviously this is the same problem as 160 metres and I wouldn't have expected this antenna to work well on MW.
All in all as a compact antenna this one is really quite impressive and the quality of construction is excellent also.