brainwagon

I haven’t been doing much work on ham radio lately. In fact, I haven’t even had my IC-735 hooked up since before Thanksgiving. But today, I decided to try to dust off the old equipment and see if I could get it powered up. After much digging around for all the right cabling, I got it mostly together, and started tuning around.

I’m not a contester, and in fact have never really worked Field Day: I prefer a more leisurely approach to ham radio. But I do like tuning around. I started out by testing my rig out with 10w of output power on JT65 on 20m. It took me a bit of work to get it sorted, but finally I started showing up on the PSK Reporter map, indicating that at least my signal was radiating. I didn’t have much luck getting anyone to call back though: it was already after dark, and propagation seemed to be waning. So, I went down to 30m and tried chirping out some WSPR. While doing that, I noticed a WSPR signal, and fired up ARGO to capture this nice grab of K5CO:

But 30m was fading for me too, and I wasn’t entirely happy with my setup. So, I decided just to tune around listening to SSB signals on 40m. Down around 7.271Mhz, I caught KH6RS working a bit of a mini-pileup from Hawaii. I turned on Audacity and recorded a bit of the audio, which demonstrates the kind of reception I get with my current, quite limited antennas. Still, if you guys didn’t get a chance to tune around today, it might be vaguely comforting. 🙂

KH6RS on 40m from Maui…
Hope you all had a fun field day.