Radio Is Odd

I'm perpetually surprised by what keeps me coming back to this curious pastime of ours. I've blown hot and cold about it for years, but today has been an interesting day. Not because of the log - five or so entries, and no great DX - a CW with G3SES in Chester on 80m being memorably because we had a chat. And an attempt at 70cm WSPR with G4VXE being memorably because we didn't.

Working with cheap wires means what whilst I'm playing with CW on 80 and WSPR on 70cm I can leave the 817 (ex-SOTA, battered...) with the Very Long Wire Across End Of Garden running on 160m.

I had thought that 10m would be interesting today. It looked that way about 09:40z, when the continent had an opening to VK land. That didn't metamorphose over to the UK and, byt he time I got home from work at 1PM, 10m was dead.

160m yielded this this afternoon:

I've been on my usual 500mW, and the two DX contacts are "heard me" and, in the case of OZ7IT, it worked both ways - almost a QSO.

What's really interesting is that I have started to use WSPR to look at propagation. Instead of the International Beacon Project. It looks to me as if 10m prop, for example, is much more granular. The opening to VK this morning was quite a small footprint on the map. And the key thing was, there were enough of the WSPR dummies doing all the legwork to produce the map.

Utterly brilliant. Thanks Joe! And the JT9-1 QSO on 17m with OM5NA was a nice catch. He was buried under QRO RTTY. Didn't stop JT9-1 working.

And today's log contains 6 entries. Content!

160m Opera

Just when I thought I wouldn't accomplish anything interesting this week because of work commitments an interesting bit of DX popped out of the bag.

Opera, which looks like a slightly clunkier version of WSPR, sits on my desktop. If tempted to turn it on I seem to end up on 14.065 because that's where everyone else is. So, this time I didn't - 1.836 MHz, 10 watts, and off down the garden for a cup of tea.

I pop back a bit later and there's a 2-way (heard and hearing, which Opera decorates with the label "QSO") with RX3DHR, in KO94ks. That's 2700 km, approximately, which beats my previous DX of just under 2000 km. Bear in mind all my QSOs are low power, if not strictly QRP.

Opera is worth a try if you like this sort of digital mode. It's all a bit low-tech in comparison with WSPR. The WSPR algorithm looks state-of-the-art. Opera's is a twist on QRSS CW so, as I write, the rig is being keyed by the soundcard sending an Opera beacon. Allegedly, the performance is beter than WSPR. I have yet to corroborate that - The consensus of opinion seems to be that it's about the same, but since far fewer souls spend their lives in Opera, WSPR gets far more DX because there are more people playing.

Could do with a few more on some bands though. 2m WSPR beaconing seems to be an inefficient way of warming the shack up...

160 metres

I improved my antenna system this afternoon - I've now got a much longer long wire which is a bit higher - I can't quite touch the apex. I'm still using 500mW/817/T1 tuner, and the XYL's washign line pole as earth, and my DX heard record is S59I at about 1500 km. He hasn't heard me. Best "heard me" is DK6UG at about 900km.

900 km at 500mW on 160m is out of this league for M0DEV. Even with JT65, I'm talking watts, not mW on that band.

160m is worth revisiting. But I do want to get my head around whether "watts per km" is sensible. I suspect it's not.