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I don’t get much from Europe with my low antenna, but DF0HQ on 40m was booming in pretty well!

The 15 meter band continues to be pretty strong today. I was getting mostly South America, but tuning around, I heard E51JD calling from Cook Islands tonight. I turned on the recorder and got this:

E51JD from the Cook Islands

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while: toss together a cheap Yagi antenna suitable for listening to AO-51 on 70cm. If you just google for “cheap yagi”, you’ll find the link to the design. An hour, some 12 gauge aluminum (not optimal, but what I had on hand), a poplar stick, some coax and hot glue, and voila. I have an antenna! Now all I have to do is wait for something to come overhead to see how it works.

Addendum: It works pretty darned good. Maybe just a little worse than my Arrow, but that’s just a guess. I was listening to N6PAA on the QRP repeater on AO-51 just a few minutes ago, and his signal was good and strong.

Well, this weekend is the CQ World Wide DX Contest, one of the larger contest weekends. I tuned up to 15m, around 21.259, and found HC8A booming in. Months ago, my 40m direct conversion receiver was initiated with reception of an RTTY signal from HC8N. Both are stations located on the Galapagos Islands. Nifty. Here’s a link to a brief MP3. You can also hear a Costa Rican station operating on the same frequency for the first half or so, then he moved up in frequency a bit.

HC8A, Galapagos Islands (MP3)

Contest exchanges are kind of boring (well, to be fair, REALLY boring) but contests do bring out large stations with lots of power, and allow you to hear zones of the earth that are largely quiet from inactivity.