I worked a new country today on 15m. Mongolia.
Mongolia
Category: Digital
Last Night On 15m
As you can see by the WSJT waterfall, 15m was going bonkers. Its great to see so much action on there.
The band was open all day and in the evening time, opened into the EU. Cant say I did all that well but I managed to make one contact into the EU and it is my first contact for the new solar cycle, it was with a station in Poland. You can see on the map i was not really being heard all that much in the EU. Probably not quite the sunspot numbers I need for my simple vertical antenna to be reliable enough. But seeing its still only early doors on the new cycle, things are looking promising. I did also spend 15m calling cq on CW, self spotted on the cluster and all and nothing. It was worth a shot.
15m and The Wall Of Japan
5pm local time and Japan is running hot on 15m. I have not seen this many signals on 15m in god knows how long. I am even working some of them. My plan was to come in here and solder up a filter for the Pi board and here I am making contacts. Japan might be easy DX from Australia, but they are plentiful and that makes it fun.
Antarctica
Pity these guys are RX only. It would be nice to get them in the log.
15m FT8
Well, from what all the talk is currently, we are no longer in solar minimum and the new solar cycles has started with vengeance. As of writing this post there are currently 21 sunspots and 15m has been open during the daytime for the last couple of days. Not that there is lots off activity, but there is enough to warrant showing some interest in the band. Anyway, I am a 15m fan boy as it is, so i need no coaxing to get on 15m and see what is going on.
The above image shows 24 hours worth of data. Not that i have been spending great amounts of time here, every hour or so i put out a few calls or enough calls for the watchdog timer to kick in and then check the map. I am not making much in the way of contacts, but I am being heard and I am hearing stations and I have had 2 incomplete contacts.
Well, I have now managed 1 contact in 2 days HAHA. Not that it matters all that much, but its good to see my favorite band open and doing something. Its been a while since there has been much action here. I know the 10m fan boys must be foaming at the mouth for some action up there. Bring on more sunspots.
New Country, St Lucia
This is a turn of events for my blog, I actually did some operating today. In fact it is even worse than that, I turned on the 2m fm rig and put it in scan mode and sat listening to a club net for a good 30mins while i did stuff for work. Shocking I know, but, you know what? It was not all that bad, at least the conversation was not about the weather, medical conditions or tomatoes.
So that got me excited enough to fire up the Icom and do a little FT8. A bit on 20m, a bit on 40m and I managed to work a new one for me on 40m. I did hear this station on 20m and pskreporter said he was hearing me, but never did see a CQ, so im thinking he might have taken a break from it. Anyway, got him on 40m and that is good enough for me.
The Final Word On WSPR
Ok this is the final word on the wspr amp. I now have spots on 15 and 10m. I call this won and done.
FT8 On 40m
Been a while since i have made an actual qso of sorts, so i did a little FT8 made 6 contacts and turned it all off again LOL Bands are hopeless for anyone running low power and crappy antenna.
WSPRing Overnight
I am going to say that this was a rather successful test after letting it run overnight. Now I am going to move forward and build the low pass filters for 20, 15 and 10m and get things cycling on there.
Incomplete :(
Incomplete with The Cow. Band died and never got the complete message. Oh well, better luck next time. This was the only exciting DX i had all day.
