Amateur radio ⁽²⁵⁰⁾

The bands were hyper last night, I've never experienced Es until now. 6m looked like 20m it was so crammed. I managed 3 FT8 QSOs in quick succession which is a lot for me and anyway 10W into a bit of wet string does not compare well when the waterfall is completely packed with strong signals. 10m was equally packed - I didn't try further down as sleep beckoned. I did try a couple of voice calls but ended swamped in a pile-up but hey, next time. Quite a bit of morse on 6m too... my learning is way too little at the moment but hopefully will pick up next month. There was even a bit of 4m FM about.

The time that a Brazilian station calling CQ on 21MHz hears you at -19 from 10W into a bit of wet string but never completes because the band is shutting down. That.

Ok with a spare bit of decent coax into the loft as I said it seemed a shame to waste it so I stuck an Anyyone AT588 70MHz set on one end and made a 4m dipole for the other. So it adds 4m to my arsenal. Bit quiet here though! This is FM of course but it did pick up what sounded like SSB at 70.220 so I fired the SDR up (desktop aerial) and sure enough heard a chap up Sutton Bank (31 miles line of sight) in the 70MHz cumulative event today.

I've taken the CB out. I wasn't making any use of it and the prices that the model sell for have gone up a lot recently, so it may end up on eBay. So... I have this nice run of coax up into the loft with a naff CB aerial on one end (to go) and a plug on the other. Seems a shame to waste it! I'm on the hunt...

I caught the tail end of the 144MHz UKAC last night. Listening around on SSB it was useful to see how effective my basic loft dipole is. This is a cut-down old FM radio antenna I've had for decades. It's fixed horizontal roughly east-west so should max north and south. The closest heard was around 7 miles off the west end of the dipole and a clear path, and the furthest was 35 miles roughly ENE with a lot of buildings and a hill in the way. No idea the strengths of those because the S-meter packed in while I was listening, but all were easy R5 and plenty of juice. I've also no idea what power they were using and this is all very unscientific but at least proves the stuff works. Hopefully I'll be free to join in next month. Now if I could just manage a rotatable 6/4/2/70 setup on one of the chimneys... one day.