More on the callsign changing saga
I was going to post the following to the UK VHF Contesting group, until I thought better of it and decided not to poke the hornet's nest...
A bit of a warning to those who intend to upgrade or otherwise change callsign, and care about your UKAC results... You need to do it at the end of a year.
I upgraded to a full license a the RSGB Convention last year. Due to errors at Ofcom I've been issued a few different callsigns over...
Read MoreM5MAT
In September 2019 I passed my full license exam. Yay me. After the result was confirmed I filled in a paper application so that I could request a specific callsign - M5MAT (the online system doesn't allow you to request a particular callsign).
As far as I could tell that callsign was available - it wasn't registered on QRZ.com, it didn't come up as being assigned in recent Ofcom FoIA responses and nothing showed up when searching for it on Google, Twitter etc.
After paying...
Read More2m UKAC January 2020
This was the first (update: and also the last) use of my new Full callsign M0IZZ. I got off to a slightly late start but once under way the rate was reasonable. The final squares tally was also reasonable - not as good as last month but not the worst it's been either.
Following the contest and the callsign confusion I contacted the RSGB Contest Committee to highlight to them that I would need to enter future contests under a new callsign. More on that
2019 Wrap-up
Stats
Total QSOs - 1225, about double 2018 total.
Contests Entered - 20 (10 × 2m UKAC, 10 × 70cm UKAC)
UKAC Final Position - 111/697 overall (10/203 on 2m, and 2nd place intermediate station, 13/151 on 70cm), last year was 304/733 (49/210 on 2m)
Notable QSOs
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G3MXH (2019-08-06) - Terry, G3MXH helped me pass my novice exam 20-odd years ago and did much to help my...
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Avatar
Avatar is a simple avatar generator. Styles and colours are derived from the MD5 hash of the 'name' provided. Two generators are included - 'robot' and 'face'.
Some examples are given below. The format for the url is
https://app.deadbeef.cafe/avatar/{style}/{name}
e.g. For an 8-Bit style face avatar of M0IZZ:
DXClusterBridge
Deadbeef Cafe appserver DXClusterBridge setup. This is mostly for my own reference
Admin
Add a user
sudo mosquitto_passwd /etc/mosquitto/passwd <callsign>
Stop and start the broker (note that a restart doesn't seem to work)
sudo systemctl stop mosquitto
wait a bit...
sudo systemctl start mosquitto
Deadbeef Cafe App Server
Deadbeef Cafe appserver setup. This is mostly for my own reference
Inbound connections permitted on 80, 443 and 8080. 8080 goes directly to Tomcat, 80 & 443 are terminated by an nginx reverse proxy. This proxy redirects 80 to 443 and terminates SSL with a LetsEncrypt Cert (for app.deadbeef.cafe, other subdomains not implemented). LetsEncrypt cert is managed by certbot.
Services
The following services are running on the app...
Read More2m UKAC December 2019
Active as 2E1HNK/P from Broadway Tower again.
Got off to a late start as I tried to put up a 9m mast to take best advantage of the forecast tropo enhancement. The mast had other ideas and effected an uncontrolled descent. This bent one of the elements but not too severely, so it didn't take long to bend it back and put the mast up at the usual 6m. I missed the first 15 minutes of the contest but go off to a good start nontheless. After running for about 20 mins I was approached by...
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MØIZZ
I'm now MØIZZ!
After a fair amount of wrangling with Ofcom, including being issued G2KS for a period of 49 minutes, they have finally ignored my request for M5MAT and issued me MØIZZ. This callsign breaks a few of my self-imposed rules, notable it has a repeating character (Z) and also the twitter username @M0IZZ is not available, so on twitter I'll be @M0IZZ_Matt.
Read More70cm UKAC November 2019
No 2m entry this month due to family duties, however I did make it out for 70cm.
This was the first appearance of my newly-finished 23-element yagi. Unfortunately conditions were not good so there wasn't much demonstrable improvement over the old 7-element one. An additional problem was that whilst it is quite easy to get the 7-element up to the full 6m mast height (and I think 9m might be quite straightforward too, if I don't put the rotator too far up), I had to limit the mast to...
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