Category - Blog

Conditions still remain good but from one day good to one day bad. 10/12/15 metres have been the bands to watch of late with very good propagation to the Caribbean and also to the Far East. As well as several JA, BY and VK on 15M, I worked my first JA on 12M along with JT, VU, ZS & D2 on 10M.

The Band on 10M was well open by 0900UTC and VK stations were very abundant. After several qso’s with VK4, I managed to work Stuie VK8NSB in Darwin, cracking signal here and made all the more interesting by watching his live internet feed, (watching the qso through the internet whilst at the same time talking on 10m), amazing.

Shortly afterwards I heard Brendon VK8FQRP calling again on 10M, calling from Wanguri in the Northern Territory of Australia. His RST was 59 down to 57 with QSB and in return I received 59. Brendon was running 10 watts into a 3 element Quad (Photo above) as opposed to my 400w into the 2 element SteppIR. Brendon then suggested a qso with 1 Watt, just to see if we could make it and I obliged. I turned my power down as low as possible (FT1000MP around 3-10 watts?, difficult to measure accurately) and Brendon returned with 1 watt. He still had a 4/1 signal into my QTH, quite remarkable, even more so that it happened on 10M SSB!

Well done Brendon, hope to hear you again soon!

All the Qsl Card requests for the Yorkshire Dales Day event (GB1YDD) have now been issued.

If you require a Qsl Card confirmation for this event (WFF- GFF-020) then please email me or apply on-line here and I will drop one in the system for you.

Dxpedition team now Qrv on Sable Island (IOTA NA-063).

Managed to work them on 17m this lunch time with a very good signal.

The contact not only gave me a precious all time new DXCC, but also my 500th IOTA reference!

Many thanks Wayne & good luck with the trip!

Earlier today, International Space Station (ISS) transited the Sun and it was visible over south Florida.

“The ISS paid a visit to the Winter Star Party in the Florida Keys,” says Allan Friedman, a resident of New York.

“A fine transit of the ISS across the sun was scheduled for 2:39 p.m. not far from this annual gathering of astronomers.

I was scheduled to give a talk on astrophotography ending at 1:30 p.m. As soon as it was done, I made a mad dash to set up and record the pass.

We barely made it in time to catch the ISS silhouetted against the limb of the sun.
Total elapsed time of the transit from our location at Knights Key Resort and Marina – one fifth of a second. A blink of an eye and an 1800 mile drive to see it!”

There were two good passes of the ISS in the UK last night. Sadly though, both the Space Shuttle Discovery and the ISS had ‘merged’ by the time it go to us so no viewing of Discovery as a seperate unit :-(. Nevertheless, it was awesome as always (IMHO)!.

A solar wind stream hit Earth’s magnetic field on March 1st, sparking a day-long geomagnetic storm and bright auroras around the Arctic Circle.

NASA space physicist James Spann photographed the display from Poker Flat, Alaska.

Congratulations to the three Operators from the Strictly Contest Group for their          achievements in National Field Day 2010.

They managed to become 160M Band leaders in the Open Section of the Event.

Well done guys!

The quiet didn’t last long!!
Earth-orbiting satellites detected an M3-class solar flare at 0735 UTC on Feb. 24th. The source was an active region located just behind the sun’s eastern limb. The eruption produced strong radio emissions, a coronal mass ejection (not Earth directed), and this spectacular picture taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory: