Last weekend, New Zealand issued permissions on a trial basis to operate on 60 metres. That was very good news, first of all for the ZL ops who had been waiting for this opportunity for a very long time after the WRC-15 results came into force January 2017. It is hoped that this will lead… Continue reading »
Recently, I scanned some pictures and I though it was nice to share them here. Four of them are of the VHF/UHF/SHF contest station that we ran between 1981 and 1987. The first location was abandoned because of blocking trees. The latter location was on top of a school building with a superb take-off. We… Continue reading »
It is quite obvious that the internet helps to spread news very fast and thus, a real FT8 explosion took place. On busy moments there is a myriad of stations and it is impressive to watch how good the WSJT-X software decodes the whole bunch every 15 seconds. Hats off for the developers! The FT8… Continue reading »
FT8 has been around for some time now. It was adopted fast by the amateur radio community and it is clear that FT8 overtook JT65 quickly. But is it an improvement? It has to be said that Franke and Taylor (FT) have done a tremendous job with the development of various weak signal modes and… Continue reading »
Trying to improve reception on 60 metres, many experiments followed, but nothing worked… It reminded me about Catweazle, a wizard in a TV series that ran during the early seventies. Numerous receive antennas were tried, but none of them outperformed my dipole. Close to the dipole were a flag and a resonant loop. The flag… Continue reading »
In PA-land, the telephone network is underground. Overhead telephone lines are a thing from the past here. I do not know of interference cases, which does not mean that interference does not exist. As the industry tries to find ways to make money increase the bandwidth, new standards are developed. One of them is G.fast…. Continue reading »
A paper, prepared for the upcoming IARU Region 1 conference, raised another alarm bell for me. Although up till now, no wind farms are near my QTH, but from the IARU paper, it can be learned that wind farms cause interference at distances up to several kilometres! Here is the report:Radiated RF emissions from wind… Continue reading »
A few days ago I worked PJ7/W9DR for a new entity on 6 metres. In the past, the entity was deleted because of the change in governmental structure. The contact with PJ7/W9DR was greatly appreciated! Looking W9DR up on QRZ.com led me to a nice video of his water cooled 6 metres amplifier, that runs… Continue reading »
The FCC recently issued an order where AFX inc. will have to pay a $ 90,000 civil penalty for marketing non compliant equipment that caused interference. The company marketed LED lighting devices without prior authorisation. This is the FCC Order. It is about time, Europe adopted the same policy. The industry will think before marketing… Continue reading »
After putting up the 5+5 element YU7EF 6/4 metre dual band antenna, I was curious how the new antenna performs. Although I realise that a real measurement requires quite a bit of effort, a simple comparison between the new antenna and an antenna with a more or less known performance at least gives a clue… Continue reading »