An excellent opening to New Zealand was observed on 11 February 2018. The station was switched on around 0700 UTC and several ZL stations came in with good signals. At some point, I decoded 4 ZL stations at the same moment and the 4 calls shown on JT Alert was an unique and impressive experience…. Continue reading »
Today, I stumbled upon a write-up of Joe Taylor, K1JT about developing a version of FT8, intended to be used by DXpeditions. In spite of the fact, that I do not favour FT8, especially because it takes out the lower tier of the signal to noise range, I consider this an interesting and valuable development…. Continue reading »
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 »
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 »