Radio and rails...

Well 20m seems to keep springing into life these days, JT-wise anyway. Lots of American stations (north and south) but I have had little luck in managing many QSOs. Then last night I had a JT9 QSO all the way to Chile at 11,800km. Not bad for my bit of wet string in the loft. Mind you, looking him up on qrz.com shows a massive antenna array so he was doing all the work! Today my first QSO was JT65 at a mere 620km. There are a lot of European stations on right now.

Well last night 20m was alive with JT65 and JT9. I saw lots of stations from North America and a number from South America. I replied to a dozen or so US but no-one heard me. Oh well. I tried a couple of EU stations, again nothing. Hmmm. Then the band died off... try again tonight! Mind you, if this stuff was too easy it would not be fun. One thing that would be useful is a clock that bleeps every minute but on the, say 45th second to remind you to look for CQs.

Ok... so HOW many times am I going to stare at a rather inactive fldigi screen after forgetting to turn the SignaLink box on!!

I managed to decode some Feldhell tonight after scrabbling about for the document showing what various data modes look like. It's a strange mode! Unfortunately the Spanish station sending it could not receive me so no QSO, but now at least I know what to look for. It takes me back to when I was interested in telegraphy systems as a kid, some decades ago now, but I'd never seen it in any form of action - represented by computer now rather than the machinery of old. Mind you what's to say the Spanish station does not have said machinery! There's a whole bunch of info over at https://www.nonstopsystems.com/radio/hellschreiber-function-operation.htm

I noticed just now that the Raspberry Pi that runs my ADBS receiver and also has '1-Wire' temperature sensors for the central heating registered a pipe temperature of a theoretically impossible -1700C. Oh, did I mention that my 20m / 6m dipole is in the loft... and the Pi is in the loft... about 2 feet from one leg of the dipole... Hmmm. I can see a connection here given the timestamp was the same as a JT65 transmission.