First Snow of The Season

Preparing for Winter

It is that time of the year again. All the old antenna projects that are laying in the garden needs to be dismantled. Garage needs cleaning from the aluminium and copper pieces, not to mention a random pile of several hundred meters of "official Finnish antenna wire" i.e "Killu".

So basically the time between this post and the previous has been cleaning. Very little radio time.

Lots of time in the shack though.. preparing for the winter. Got my KX3 delivered by QRP Project guys. I definitely can recommend their great service. I also got the milliwatt WSPR beacon for 30m band from QRSS specialist Hans Summers http://www.hanssummers.com/ I already have constructed their QRSS CW kit, but wanted the "ultimate" version for 30m WSPR work. For the RX side I constructed and tested the SoftRock Ensemble rx ii kit. I have a couple more of the SoftRocks in pieces and during the winter the plan is to put these online to serve the ham community.

The low band antenna upgrade took a leap forward. Last weekend I were on the road and transferred the tower #2 pieces from eastern Finland to my QTH. The plan is to construct 160m 1/4 lambda vertical and 80m four square to complement the antenna setup. The 160m plan is still in flux.

Radio Time

As said earlier very little time with the radios in QSO mode, but of course some qsos in the log.

Three new IOTAs from P29 IOTA island hopping pedition P29NI. The band conditions have been reasonable and thaks to SM6CVX in the team they have been on the right bands at the right time to provide the new IOTAs to Scandinavia. Big Thank You for remembering us up here! Unfortunately, due to travelling I missed the Lihir OC-069.

Vatican

On Sunday when I got back home with the tower #2 I turned on the radio and noticed a big pileup on 15m band. That was HV0A, Francesco from Vatican. I do have Vatican in the log but not for this year so this was definitely must to work. Since it was SSB I decided to go QRO and heat up my amp. The split was running 10k wide. While the amp was heating I tried to listen the pileup. His antenna was beaming stateside and he was taking lots of Gs, DLs, and of course Ws and VEs. The Ws were coming from the back of my beam so when the amp was ready I was still with no clue where he was actually listening. He was +20 on my S-meter so my guess was that if I hit to his passband I will be at least +20 and getting through. I set the XIT to about 4 up, gave my call once and he came back "OH3 59". I repeated my call and we exchanged the reports. That was a lucky catch.