Radio at night

Tonight I heard some interesting stations:

• DA0UBOOT (100 years of German submarines) - I think it's the first time I have seen a 5-letter suffix!
• DP07M/mm - German expedition on a ship. The operator transmitted his coordinates - I think it was 75ºN, 3ºW.

Besides there's a lot of activity from islands - it must be IOTA contest coming this weekend.

More stations on 10 MHz

My homebrew key is much easier to work with than the microphone switches!

UE1OTA/1 is now in the log. To my amazement, I also heard K1NA and ZF2AH with strong signals. The distance to Cayman Islands is 8000 km - not bad for my casual antenna (yet to be given special treatment in this blog).

Homebrew iambic key

It was time to get myself an iambic key. While my Bencher is still in Poland, I decided to make the paddle myself. It took some adjustments and more work may be needed later, but the first impression is very good - almost like Bencher...

The key has been built of materials and hardware available at home (plywood and steel) with simple tools (saw, driller, screwdriver and soldering gun). Total cost is 1 Euro in screws, nuts and washers, 2 hours of my time (time is money) and my son's bleeding finger (what are these interesting tools Dad is playing with?).

First QSOs of PA/SP2WDW

I have no "proper" antenna. I have no "proper" CW key. And I have just logged three QSOs with OY, F and G on 10 MHz CW!

It turns out that UP/DOWN keys of the microphone can be used to replace a paddle key. Such CW operation is far from comfortable, but it may be done. I'm going to build a better key soon.

The antenna I used deserves a detailed description, which will follow later.

Why am I doing this?

I'm back to amateur radio!

This time my radio activity is going to involve more experiments than actual QSOs. I expect to collect some measurement data that might be useful to others, so I decided to share it here.

This blog is an experiment, too - I've never done this before and in fact I don't really like blogs.