Apathy has ruled

Well the blog seems to have taken a back seat in recent times.

So you haven't heard about:
1.   The March 144/432MHz when I took my 70cms system to G4TSW to investigate the 144MHz QRM into the 70cms system that plagued VHFNFD in 2013.  Well - we confirmed that we have a big issue and didn't find a solution!  Though the preamps work fine in the shack if you can put up with the added cable loss?!  And then we had a weather event during the takedown and I haven't been as wet for a long time.

2.   The First 50MHz contest.  G4FRE returned from Dallas for a family wedding and managed to arrange dragging me out on this one during his short stay in the UK.  A pleasnt event with good weather from Ankerdione Hill.

3.    The CQ WPX CW contest at the end of May.  I was sort of arm twisted into this one by a friend (G4FJK) who I narrowly beat in the CQ-WW-CW contest in November last year.  We decided that we would both do a single band entry on 10 metres using assistance - i.e. the cluster, reverse beacon network etc.  I would be using 100 watts to my end fed half wave vertical with the base at about 30 feet.  Tim would be using 100 watts to a 4 element beam - but he claims not to be a CW operator !!

After the euphoria of the 10 metre conditions over the winter, this was a reality check.  Signals around Europe varied from massive to very weak.  Africa, Asia and Oceania were virtually non-existent.  For the first time ever in an HF contest I did not work a single station in either W or VE.  Interestingly the VOACAP online propagation predictor got that just right.  There were a lot of South American stations on.  Most of them were very weak.  Had I not been used to listening to white noise on VHF and UHF, this would have been an interesting challenge.  Whether this was F layer or multi-hop Sporadic Es I'm not sure as there were openings on 6m at the same time and that is definitely multi-hop Es.

Given the band was not packed, I found the combination of the pan adapter and the RBN spots in the N1MM band map to be a very effective way of identifying new people to work.

It is quite surprising now looking at the log to discover that I only actually operated for a total of eight and a half hours - it seemed much more than that.  Though I did manage to watch both the Monaco qualifying and race as well as both the Championship and League One play off finals!.

Most of the operating was search and pounce as I really struggled to get a run going when calling CQ.  An amplifier or an antenna with gain would have been a massive boost under these conditions.  So, I managed 211 QSOs into 52 countries.  Of these 171 were Europe, 24 were South America, 9 Asia, 6 Africa, 2 North America (actually the Caribbean), and one into Oceania.

Given that prefixes are multipliers, a lot of really obscure callsigns appear on the band.  I think the best I worked was 4X266POPE !!!!  Why 266 ?

As you will have guessed by now, I was soundly thrashed by Tim who worked 299 QSOs - I really think that the beam helped under these conditions.  Still my overall 2014 score has increased to 138 countries and amazingly I've worked 108 on 10m so far this year.