The rope came undone at far end of my EFRW. I had to fish it back down with a wire hook stuck in a fishing pole.
The SWR was a bit high, and I found broken wires in 9:1 balun, so I stripped the wires and reassembled it.
With the antenna working again, I contacted New Caledonia on 10M FT8 with 8W.
I activated US-9719 Susquehanna Riverlands. The tempurature was decent, though a little bit of a mist. I got lots of practice throwing very high in the tree. I used all my throw line to hoist my EFHW into the air. Some people lingered to watch while I struggled to get just the right branch.
I found a large section of coax was bad, so had to scramble a little to get enough cable. I worked 20M to get 2 CW park-to-park contacts and 28 more FT4 contacts
I watched a video about NVIS NVIS achieves 75-90 degree take-off, very vertical, and about a 400-mile range. It can get you over obstacles. It’s most effective on 40m and 80m.
To build it, mount a dipole 1/8 wavelength above ground, horizontal. Add a reflector almost on the ground, 5% longer, to keep the ground from absorbing the signal.
I did a bit of the ARRL 10m Contest all in CW. I keyed with my 3D-printed iambic paddle but relied on the X6100 to decode incoming signals for me.
I made 13 contacts across 10 states/provinces in 4 ITU zones. I used the Web2Cabrillo website to type up my handwritten logs and produce a Cabrillo file to submit to the contest.
I found the brand new wsjtx-improved available on my Debian unstable system. It’s the next beta plus some UI enhancements including filters, color, etc, better location labels.
This weekend was the FT Challenge.
I made about 112 contacts over 14 unique “letter grids”. I operated QRP (<5W), single operator, single radio. We scored points for each contact plus each 3000km distance on a contact, and the multiplier was that number of unique letter grids. I uploaded my logs, and it’ll probably be a while until I see an official score, but I figure I probably got about 2000 points.
I got Japan, Colombia, and Uruquay on 12m FT8 today. I got so much Japan from Hawaii, I assumed I’d not see it for a long time. Winter is good in 10M and 12M.
I was able to hear a 10M beacon today at 28193.180kHz:
E E E E E VVV DE VE4ARM / B AMATEUR RADIO MUSEUM / AUSTIN MANITOBA / EN 09 E E E
I stumbled into a couple Olivia signals
on 14071kHz,
and on a good guess,
I fired up fldigi,
and I was able to decode them.
They were Olivia-8/250 encoded.
I found lots of
good documents on Olivia
to read some mmore about where they’re likely found.