Monday, September 26, 2022
CQ WW CC members are enemies of Ham Radio and Contesting?
Sunday, September 18, 2022
Square halo SWR at rain and ATNO
12m best SWR 24.980MHz 1,1:1 R48 X3 shifted 20Khz down
15m best SWR 21.116MHz 1,8:1 R95 X0 shifted 4KHz down and SWR got worse
17m best SWR 17.840MHz 1,3:1 R60 X11 shifted 360KHz down
20m best SWR 14.272MHz 1,4:1 R60 X20 shifted 72KHz up!
The rain has a very good effect on 12m. But a dramatic effect on 17m and 15m. Strange enough best SWR on 20m shifted up. Next experiment would be installing the autotuner below the square halo to compensate for these SWR/resonance shifts.
By the way the rain has also effect on my 4 element 10m band LFA. SWR/resonance shifts down about 100KHz.
After looking for ZL7 (Chatham Isl.) on 60m in the greyline without success this morning I decided to see if 10m would be open. At first I was already welcomed by solar panel QRM right at the bottom of 28.074 MHz the 10m FT8 frequency. Something that gets worse lately as more and more solarpanels showing up on the roofs of neighbouring homes.
Anyway turning the antenna away from the village towards Australia cleared things a little, It was just at the start of some extraordinary good propagation towards the east. Worked some Australian stations, Thailand, Egypt, Vietnam and much later Timor Leste on 28.088MHz FT8 F/H. I had to look for this country which is somewhere near Indonesia (in fact it was occupied by Indonesia till 2002). It is my first all band ATNO of 2022.
Signal from 4W/JH2EUV was superstrong. I think a SSB QSO would certainly be possible. However the long callsign seems to give some issues in F/H mode. This is how the QSO went here:
4W/JH2EUV responded without the 4W/ prefix. Luckely JTDX still did understand it was the same station although displayed different. It responded automatically with the R -04 report. 4W/JH2EUV responded again without the 4W/ prefix and gave RR73 but also in the same sequence with another report and the complete 4W/JH4EUV call which was very confusing. Discussing the matter with DB6LL Hartmut did give me the confidence the QSO is valid. Though it seems to be a glitch in WSJT-X or in JTDX.