20 meters was going nuts today.....

[WX2MIG]

Thanks for the link Beetle, got it bookmarked.....

Stumbled onto another good one this morning on 20 meters.....

UA3TCJ in Dzerzhinsk, Russia with a solid 3 to 5 on the "S" meter, and a good clear signal with minimum noise......

The last time I made a contact in Russia was 1989, on 10 meters CW....Wish I still had that QSL card......

 

[WX2MIG]

Although very noisey, and propagation is still not the best, I managed to score a couple more DX contacts today on 20 meters....
EA3DIQ Carlos in Spain, and IN3ZNR Fabrizio in Italy.....

What I found a bit strange was the guy in Italy was on 14.248.2 Mhz
I usually tune in most everybody else at .0, or .5 Mhz, but that's the first one on 20 meters that was parked on .2 Mhz.

I did have a DX contact once on 40 meters that was at .1 Mhz, but again I usually find them at either .0 or .5 Mhz.....anybody else ever get that....???

 

[Beetle]

I was going to mention this several times but never got around to it -- it really isn't necessary to specify a frequency down to the 100 Hz level. Most of us just say that we worked a VK7 on 20 and let it go at that.

Most of us (at least most of us OFs) don't pay that much attention to whether the right-hand digit is a zero or a five or anything else. There's no rule or law that says you HAVE to transmit on specified decimal places on HF. The only requirement is that you be licensed for where you're transmitting and that your transmission is entirely within the band.

So you worked Spain and Italy on 20M. Good job!

 

[WX2MIG]

Understood Beetle......

Other than the fact that I'm still a rookie at this HF stuff, I just kinda found it interesting since the vast majority of contacts that I've made so far have been dead on .0 or .5, and that only two of them, and both being European DX contacts were set at an odd number. Your point is of course a valid one, it just seemed to me that most all other amateur operators park their VFO on the .0 or .5.....

The other thing I found interesting was my Italian contact (IN3ZNR) stated in his QRZ bio that he doesn't do eQSL, only traditional QSL cards. That's the way I prefer it too, although I did recently register with eQSL so that I could get those QSL's that 3 of my contacts sent me, I'd rather get them in the mail.....that's part of the fun of getting them......

 

[Beetle]

"The fun of getting them [QSLs]"...boy howdy!

Right after I got my Conditional-class license and got my first beam I was bitten rather hard by the DX bug. Nevada, at that time, was considered extremely rare (smallest population and fewest hams). So foreign hams looking to complete WAS were always looking for me. I remember working 4X4FU on 10 CW. I could tell he was happy. Received his card a week later, air mail from Israel, complete with a SASE (self-addressed, stamped envelope). I'd already sent him my card, but I followed up with a second one using his SASE. Said he'd been looking for Nevada for 15 years (and this was 1961).

 

[WX2MIG]

20 meters finally woke up again

For the last three to four weeks 20 meters has been flatter than day old beer, it's been so bad I haven't been able to check into the Maritime Mobile Service net without a relay to net control...

Approx 16:35 GMT today I nailed a DX contact with CT3FT Cedric on Madereira Island off the coast of Portugal. He was running an IC-756Pro with a 500 watt heater, and I was on my TS-130S barefooting it as usual......

It's good to see the band finally wake up again.....

 

[RickC.]

The band has pretty much been crap every time I've had a chance to get on. I reconfigured my end fed vertical into a j-pole yesterday, hopefully I can hear something besides 7s and 9s that can't hear each other sometime in the next few days.



Rick

 

[WX2MIG]

The band has pretty much been crap every time I've had a chance to get on. I reconfigured my end fed vertical into a j-pole yesterday, hopefully I can hear something besides 7s and 9s that can't hear each other sometime in the next few days.Rick

Hope that change works out for you Rick, I've been running with a 20 meter home brew dipole that faces ESE and WNW, with the Atlantic ocean only a couple miles from my QTH, I seem to be able to hit a lot of western Europe on 100 watts. Al though I have make contacts in Russia, Belgium, Poland, and Slovenia, I seem to hit the area of Spain, Italy, and Portugal the best.
I scanned the band again later in the day right around grey line time, and heard a couple more European stations, but they all had serious pile ups trying to work them, I don't usually do pile ups unless the DX station is 20 over 9, and I think I might have a shot at it...(that's only happened a couple of times)....otherwise I move on and look for the easy pickings.....

 

[RickC.]

Hey thanks-- and cool prefix!

The good thing about EA, I, and CT is that are so many hams there, Italy, especially-- so those countries are usually easier to hear in the eastern US.

We're about to get a new roof so anything I do with antennas here in the next few weeks will be temporary/experimental, but I'd really like to wring this j-pole out before I take it down and put the yagi back up. The yagi came down because the light duty rotor I have couldn't handle it, and I figured I'd play a bit before buying a new rotor. I have a good idea of how the yagi compared to the dipole when switching back and forth, but I really would like to see how this vertical fares in comparison to what I know of the yagi. I need more DX signals to do that!

One thing I'm thinking about is putting up a fixed, reversible yagi for 20. Set at 44 degrees from Alabama that will take care of Europe, the British isles, and north Africa, and firing the reverse will cover Australia and much of Oceania. So I may try that, though it'd be easier (but more expensive) to just get a new rotor and be done with it. If I had room I'd use phased verticals. I had a pair of those in two previous QTHs and they were fun to use and worked well.

 

[WX2MIG]

I'm getting enough grief from the other half over the wire antennas I have strung up now, I know she'd never go for a tower or beams. The nice thing with the wire dipoles are the fact that they are hardly noticeable in the winter, and completely camouflaged by the trees and foliage in the summer....

Anyway.....added another DX contact from the same region today on 14.281.0 with EA8AM in the Canary Islands, a lot more background noise today, and this one was a little hard to hear, but we did manage to exchange call's, names, and signal reports before he faded on me.
Then I went to 14.290.0 and checked into the OMISS net, no sooner than I did I started to get a bunch of QRM from a South American station on 14.292.0 and had to check out......

 

[Hutch]

I've been doing great on 20m this last week with 100w and my new Cushcraft R8, Argentina, Brazil, Belarus, Kuwait, Italy, France, just to name a few off the top of my head. I even had Netherlands Antilles, Bermuda and Costa Rica mobile on my Ic-7000 with my Little Tarheel II. Almost all reports were 5/9 or 5/9+ with only a couple of 5/7's.