Keeping an ear open...

The recent sunny weather here in the UK has mixed blessings. Its great to get outside and see some sunshine, but all the gardening and outdoor chores mean less time for radio! still I have been managing to keep an ear on the bands, have a few QSOs and still do a bit of CW practice. I haven't found the higher HF bands to be very lively of late. As a result its been back to 30metres for much of my operating. Still lets hope the Sporadic E season brings us some activity. I hope we will see some 10 metre and six metre activity soon. When 6 metres is open it can be an amazing band. Even with my simple loft dipole on 6 metres last tear some of the signals on the band were very strong. Looking back at my logbook I see that most of the sporadic E contacts I had were in June and July so perhaps we have a while to wait. The most surprising contact of 2009 was for me on 70mhz (4 metres)  FM  where I worked S51DI (Slovenia) using an indoor wire dipole!, it was a true chance contact, he was calling on 70450 we managed to exchange reports and then he was gone.

Surgery

I had an interesting comment on my previous report regarding my Pye MX294 4 metre rig.
Ian, MW0IAN informed me that the MX294 should be capable of around 20-25 watts output. My rig was giving an output of 6watts. A little internet research showed that adjusting the power should be fairly straightforward. Opening the rig up revealed (as hopefully the picture above shows) that there are several adjustments possible, all of which are clearly marked. Connecting the rig to a dummy load, I set the RF Power adjustment to give approximately 18 watts out.

This was by no means flat out but I don't want to overdrive or overheat the rig. Having replaced the covers, a quick test with a local on 4 metres confirmed all was ok. At the 18 watt setting the rig is only drawing 4 amps from my PSU although it it getting slightly warmer than it was running 6watts! Here is the rig, back in its operating position and screwed back together.

Logbooks

Last year as my old  paper logbook was filling up I decided to buy a "Deluxe" logbook as offereed by the RSGB (Radio Society of Great Britain). I have written about logging before, personally although we are no longer obliged to do so in the UK I still like to log all my contacts. Whilst all my data mode contacts get automatically logged in the DIGIPAN software  I think its good to have a written records also.
Anyway, back to my deluxe logbook, it was very nice packed full of information about bandplans, repeaters, country prefixes and so on. There was even a diary section, oh and of course a logbook section. I started this new logbook in October last and and by the middle of this week I had filled it. That may sound like I am a very active Radio Amateur but thats not really true. You see with all the additional information built into this logbook there isn't much room left for actual logging. I worked out that the Deluxe logbook could hold details of a maximum of 600 contacts. The traditonal logbook which doesn't have all the additional pages can take over 2000 contacts. No prizes for guessing which type of log I am using now. I guess I should get used to doing all of this electronically on the PC. In fact all of my contacts up to the year 2000 are on an electronic log, but not since then. I don't really want to spend hours inputting old logs either, so I will carry on with using paper for now!
I have had some recent success decoding OLIVIA transmissions on 20 metres. I note that most stations seem to use the 32/1000 settings. I still haven't tried a CQ call in that mode yet. I have also head some of the new mode ROS around the same frequencies although that mode doesn't seem particularly active.
This week I was operating on 4 metres using my loft mounted dipole. I received a report of "5 and 9" from a station I could barely hear, in fact he was only just above the minimum squelch threshold on my Ascom SE550 rig. I immediately suspected that my rig was more than a little deaf. Since I have only used 4 metres from this QTH for very local contacts it would be difficult to tell.Anyway up into the loft I went and dug out my other 4 metres rig, an old, 16 channel Pye MX294. No bells and whistles on this rig, and with a TX power output of only around 6 watts the range should be down on the 25watt Ascom rig. Early indications are though that this rig has a much better set of ears!