Marconi Two Metre Contest

I've left it to late in life to ever be a CW man but when there's activity in the CW segment of Two I do like to listen. So the Marconi Contest this year was one such opportunity and it happened that it coincided with some good tropo. Here's a couple of screen shots.

CW signals on Two during the Marconi contest 2015

Here's the best I heard


OM3W JN99CH

Distance between IO81WM & JN99CH is 1456.61 km

Here's the Hepburn map for the 8/11/2015

The tropo forecast map from http://www.dxinfocentre.com/

 

Receiving distant beacon OH2VHF by meteor scatter

Left the radio running last night and into the morning just to see if I could copy a signal from the distant Finnish beacon OH2VHF on 144.443 MHz. Much to my surprise I had success and received this short burst. Although not a complete callsign the letters OH2V are pretty clear. I'll try again tonight and maybe I'll receive the complete call. 

The letters OH2V can been seen

 The dash in the V is broken but "di di di dah" can be heard clearly.

Distance between IO81WM & KP20BB is 1877.73 km

About My Scrapbook

About My Srappbook

Here are some notes about the homebrewed equipment that I have made and used over the years. It has all been constructed using the well known KISS approach, Keep It Simple and Stupid. No bells and whistles here, essential features only. I make no great claims for any of it, (some pictures click to enlarge, if you do you will see why I make no claims) other than to say that building it and using it on the air has given me the opportunity to occasionally work some DX, and no small degree of amazement that it has worked at all!radio I hope that in a small way, this website might encourage more home construction, something that can only be good for the hobby of Amateur Radio. After all, if I can do it, so can you, and very likely with better results!

144MHz E's DX

Seemed to me that the E's season this year got off to a pretty slow start but fortunately improved from mid June.  Plenty of contacts on six and four and I was particularly pleased with this two metre one ;-

Distance between IO81WM & IM63NX is 1987.75 km (1235.189 miles)

At the time there was little local activity and after the contact CN8LI went back to calling CQ.

My equipment; homebrew amplifier 200Watts, homebrew hybrid SDR, 9ele Tonna.

Two Metre Interference

Two Metre Interference: has anyone been experiencing QRM on two during the day recently. This horrible hash has been appearing on the band here. At first I thought it must be local to me but then I notced aircraft flutter indicating its was coming from someway off. So turned on rig in the van and could hear in all the way to Chippenham. Anyone else hear it?

"Large spike on right is packet, left spike is GB3VHF"

144MHz 300 Watt amplifier

Been busy making this amplifier recently.
Amp kit from the Dutch RF shop and uses the Freescale MRFE6VP6300 mosfet.
Low pass filter from Homebrew RadCom.
Relay sequencing.
VSWR protection.

SIX Metre amplifier

I've built a couple of amplifiers recently. This one is for Six Metres, I just followed a design from OZ1PIF's website. It uses eight IRF510 MOSFETs. Output should be up to 250 Watts but I've not driven it hard enough to obtain that amount of power but 10 in produces 150 out so I'm happy with that. Seems to tie in nicely with the figures on OZ1PIF'S site. It's QRP to some but I've rarely run more than 20 Watts on Six from anything home-brewed here and I once worked VK with that.

Inside eight IRF510's, RX pre-amp and low pass filter

No front panel meter, no high swr protection, no cooling fan but the MOSFETs are very cheap!

Front panel. The case is from a faulty SMPS.

A card for the amp!