11 Contacts in about an hour. Yay...
No takers on AM tho. I tried.
Did work QRP SSB to Washington and Oregon.
Gee Wally, that was Neato!
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11 Contacts in about an hour. Yay...
No takers on AM tho. I tried.
Did work QRP SSB to Washington and Oregon.
Gee Wally, that was Neato!
I love the magic band. I have about 30 states confirmed on QRP ssb. About 11 years ago I made a confirmed contact to France CW QRP (in the ssb calling channel) The FR op understood that most transmissions are valid. After the op cleared with me, there was a flurry of activity. All one could hear was cw signals trying to match my shear luck of being at the right place at the right time. CW IS permitted on every amateur frequency (it used to be) That was a one time fluke I bet. I have only made a few unconfirmed contacts into Canada (big deal), Summer time is about 75% of the activity in my experience. Look out for tropo anytime. BTW, congrats, the hook has been set deeper. I noticed 6M is always alive on field day, go figure.
I need to get some sort of horizontally polarized antenna up for 6M. AM on the band...can do with a TS-660, FT-90x/FTV-901R or FT-980/FTV-901R. That might be fun.
I have no ant here. I might have hit that one during tropo. Up near cleveland, and across the mud puddle at HAMilton! just listen about 50.07 up and down for beacons. Then scan 50.100-50.200. The calling channel is 50.125. Don't be afraid of a long CQ, that is how you meet your neighbors. 52.525 the other calling freq usually does not reach muf when I am on patrol.
50.400 has traditionally been the AM calling frequency, while .410 is one of the working frequencies which seems popular in this area. How about Springfield/Dayton, Tim - anyone in the vicinity use either of those?
Had a blast listening to the 10 meter repeater outputs from New York...
I can bring a full 100w to the 10M FM party with the FT-980s here - they're rated for continuous service at that power level in all modes. The next big trick is to fit a CTCSS encoder to one.
Should the band really shorten up in a big opening, give a listen on 29.640. That's the Salem machine - about 30mi east.
Most 10 meter local simplex/repeater use is mobile to base therefore, vertically polarized. They tend to kick on the tone squelch when the band is up. There is always a boomer from New York on 29.62, but there used to be an awesome St.Thomas, V.I repeater standard 52/62 offset. Where I live when 10 opens up, it is usually the bottom half. When 10 is up for summer time top half, I start scanning 6 meters. I love the local cross band repeaters with the 10M link. It is fun to open the link, and work fm dx with a walkie talkie on the machine. Call me old phart, but I do not qsl a repeater contact, but will a satellite, am I a machine racist?
A couple of days ago, 6 meters was open and 10 meters was hot. Just for the heck of it, I used a "wet noodle", (a Hustler mobile antenna with a 15 meter load on it that is also resonate at 50 MHz, mounted on my porch) to made my first 6 meter contact on FT-8.
I dropped down to 10 meters, changed to my di-pole and made some hook ups there.
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There was a nice 6 meter opening June 19th to the West coast. I also heard a a guy in Georgia work a KL7 in Alaska. I did work 3 stations in Arizona. Picked up 2 new grids. On the 20th it was open into Canada around Prince Edward island .
I put up an m2 loop for my backyard station. It works very well. https://www.dxengineering.com/search...torder=Default
I have a Moxon beam ordered for my station in the shack. Hopefully, I'll have it up and running for the Sept VHF contest.
Woke up to this on 2 meters this morning:
Attachment 15817
Attachment 15818
Dayum!
Wowsers.
Still kind of going on.... picks up at night then wanes a bit during the day... hope it keeps going.
Attachment 15822
SSB/CW/digital?
Rubber hose ducting?
Nice opening on 6 yesterday out to the midwest. I got to try out my new Moxon, 2 element beam. Very impressive results.
http://www.parelectronics.com/stress-moxon.php