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