I've spent the last few weeks playing with Skimmer. I use a Softrock SDR receiver, and a Clifton lab Z10000 buffer amp on the IF output of a K3. The sound card in my PC is poor so I don't see much (in terms of bandwidth) but I've got a better new sound card on the way. I found it quite hard to get everything set up and working and had to e-mail some people to get some help. It's wierd that this new technology created such a wave of controversy on the contest reflectors, but very few people are actually playing with it - or perhaps they're not letting on. The info on the web is actually not very helpful, or too simplistic.
It was interesting to watch 160m last night during the CQ WW 160m Contest, or 40m during the REF Contest yesterday afternoon.
I now have my new shack PC all wired up and fired up. Unfortunately we (my son) seems to have lost our (his) copy of WIndows XP so I've had to install 2000 Pro, which works, but means that I can't beta test iHamLogger, which I had planned to do.
Both the AFS CW and SSB Contests are now past, and the 70MHz Cumulatives are under way. And today I competely forgot about the latter. However, it does mean that the year is well under way and spring will soon be here - I see a lot of snowdrops pushing through.
I repaired and re-erected the 160m dipole today. I spent a few hours giving away some points in the CQ WW 160m, but I seem to have a problem with every receive antenna in some way now, so that'll be the next thing.
Ho Hum.
Regarding the comment about Heathrow, my mother deosn't actually live in Canada and isn't dying or dead either. I decided that I would delete my comment though, and try to stick to the ham radio script here. I will probably create a new blog for travel and other related issues. My comments were also off the mark and not particularly well written, for which I apologise.