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Amateur radio related diary

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Update 24/5/2025: Band conditions have been particularly bad recently, DX ban conditions anyway. Locally the 40m band has been great, even during the middle of the day. At night 80 has also been fine for local contacts.

There was huge excitement in the DX community when Marion Island was activated as ZS8W. As expected the pileups were huge. Sadly the operator concentrated on FT8. He did work short periods of CW and apparently he also made a few SSB contacts but only to friends. His QSO rates on CW were quite low, sometimes less than one QSO per minute. I am not sure if the pileups were too large or if he had bad QRM/QRN but the result was that it was not easy to work him on CW and that lead to huge frustration on the bands. As per usual that also brought out the worst in some operators with lots of deliberate QRM and bad messages on the DX clusters. I managed to work him on 9 band-slots but only 2 of those were CW. I heard him very strong on 10m as well but only for a few minutes every time before he went QRT.

I am happy that I did manage to work him for a new entity on QRP but it could have been better.

Our local AWA (Antique Wireless Association) now runs an early Saturday morning net specifically for older radios, great fun! So far I have only used my Yaesu FT-901DM and the Icom IC-701 on the net but I am hoping to get my Kenwood TS-520S and TS-930 going again as well. I would also like to get at least one of my two Yaesu FT-200's going again as well. Something interesting to do!

The old (47 years!) FT-901DM is still perfect. Great receiver and the output is still more than 100W with the original 6146B valves in the final.

Yaesu FT-901DM on the air, 1978 vintage.

Update 3/4/2025: Sadly I have not been active so far this year. I often listen to a few stations in the morning on 40m but I only have 2 QSO's in the log so far in 2025!  Both were CW DX contacts just for fun.

With winter around the corner I hope to do a few POTA activations soon, it has simply been too hot during the summer to go hiking. I had fun last year with POTA so hoping to have some more fun soon.

The results were released for the 2024 CQ WW DX CW contest. I managed to reasonably well but, as expected, it would need a serious effort to compete with stations in Europe and North America as they are simply so much closer to lots of DXCC entities. Running QRP makes it really difficult to be heard in Europe and North America when the bands are so crowded. But it was still fun, maybe I will do it again in 2025.

Here is my certificate.

At least I managed #1 in Africa and South Africa as well as setting new country and zone records.

Hope to be posting more regularly in the near future!

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