Comments (3)

By John Harper AE5X, February 22, 2010 12:07 am

Contest results - DXCC countries worked

As anyone who participated in the contest will tell you, 15 meters was great.

Over the course of the weekend I operated for about 10 hours and 15m was the money band. But a combination of good conditions and some excellent stations made the other bands seem pretty amazing as well. Continue reading '2010 ARRL International DX Contest ruminations'»

Comments (2)

By John Harper AE5X, February 18, 2010 1:49 pm

Looking at the label that came with my FT80 kit, I realize that there is a simpler way to label a front panel. The included decal set requires you to apply each label individually. This was necessary since the many FT80′s out there will wind up in a number of different enclosures of differing dimensions.

A quick search around the internet gave a slew of companies that produce water slide decal paper. The paper is cheap enough and even the smallest package has enough paper to make front panel labels for quite a number of projects. Continue reading 'Labels for home construction projects'»

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By John Harper AE5X, February 14, 2010 1:38 pm

One of the neatest features of any ATS-3-series of QRP radios is their high performance-to-size ratio.

The diminutive size comes at a cost though and one of those is the method of tuning. We are all used to rotary dial tuning and the pushbutton UP and DOWN buttons on the ATS-3 not only lack the traditional feel of tuning a radio, it also could be argued that you aren’t even tuning it: you’re letting the radio tune itself with your only input being in telling it which direction to tune. Continue reading 'Czech out this rotary encoder for ATS-3x series rigs'»

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By John Harper AE5X, February 10, 2010 8:17 pm

On January 20th, a solar flare caused predictions of dismal HF propagation as well as the possibility of a nighttime auroral display for those living north of 40 degrees lattitude. 12 to 18 hours prior to the expected HF shutdown, I noticed numerous spots on the DX cluster for 10, 12 and 15 meters.

So I turned on the radio and found conditions to be unusually good.

SpaceWeather.com is, as I write this, reporting a similar magnetic storm warning. And sure enough, 12 and 15 meters are alive with DX. Continue reading 'Geomagnetic storms preceded by good DX'»