Chinese takeaway at the radio club camping weekend.

Last weekend was the Watcombe Radio Club camping weekend, yours truly wasnt under canvas, but merely an evening visitor making the most of everyone else's radio, next year though I plan to do my own station, need to purchase a tent first, it does help.

Anyway I sat myself in front of Andy's (2E0OJE) radio as I know he runs a good radio and even nicer audio with the broadcast mic and EQ deck, and started tuning around 20m - The band was alive and chock-a-block with stations, lots of QRM, and in amongst the noise I heard something that well, just sounded DX, even before he said his call, you just sort of know, and no he didnt have a chinese accent at all.

His call was BD4HF, this got me asking 'where is BD' to Andy as I had never heard of it, a few shouts back and we had exchanged 5/9 both ways, his being a genuine 's' meter reading.

I then turned around to see everyone in the camp behind watching me make the contact, then run off to their own tents to try for themselves, Andy made the trip also, the others wern't so succesful as by now I suspect he had been cluster reported and there was an ever increasing 'pile-up'.

A few beers, good company and great radio, what better way to spend some time.

Myself (in the stripey fleece) writing down a callsign with alan (M6DXU) in the camo and Adrian (SWL).

Alan, M6DXU with andy, 2E0OJE in the gimp mask !

Yes I am dancing to thank the Radio Gods for my contact !!

Feld Hell fun

I have recently been 'told off' for not blogging very much lately, well like most of us especially in the summer, I dont sit in front of a computer, and I haven't been sat in front of a radio much either, so nothing much to blog about.

We have also had guest's staying in the box room/radio shack, so this certainly has not helped, anyway they are all departed now, so I fired up the radio and had a listen around as you do, found some short skip on 20m, thoughts turned to 10m, so a quick look on the cb frequencies is always worth a look as 10m can sound dead, only to hear a lot of Northern England/Scottish stations on fm cb.

A quick look round 28500 and I found MM0SGQ, Steve, in Fife, there was a lot of qsb, but we managed a contact.

This picture is from Steve's QRZ.com page, showing the Forth road bridge and Forth railway bridge, separating Fife and The Lothians.

I like these sorts of pictures, I imagine my little 10 watts jumping across the water !!

You might wonder why I havent mentioned anything about Feld Hell, well my next contact was a first for me using this mode, listening around 7035 and I heard the distinctive clicky noises in amongst the psk signals.

Hopefully the next picture shows the qso I had with IZ1CRA, Piero, in Torino, Italy.

As you may be able to see I had never heard any Hellschreiber signals before, let alone had a qso, so was pretty pleased !

Interesting thing was that there were psk signals that came and went in the bandwidth we were using, these made no difference to the readability of the Hell signal.

Also for the same audio out/alc levels I was getting less RF out compared to PSK31, according to my power meter, perhaps only 1-2 watts.

http://sites.google.com/site/feldhellclub/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellschreiber

Echolink list for the UK.

We are off for a weekend away to the Isle of Wight, and as ever I am always keen to fit a little radio in somewhere.

All I can take is the Maxlog UV dual 2m/70cm handie, but with 5w Rf output is proving pretty usefull, though not until a friend from the club (2E0HOO) kindly programmed it for me.

I have programmed in the local RF repeaters and now thanks to some digging around on the internet, local echolink RF nodes.

These took a bit of finding, until I stumbled across an old blog post by G4VXE fron January last year, so I cant take credit for it.


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