The GM4AFF Blog

This year I went to Shetland for the CQ WW SSB and it was a real struggle from start to finish! Shetland experienced the highest wind speeds of the year on the Saturday night (93 mph) and I never did get the main mast and tribander up in the air. But thank goodness, because it would have fallen down in those winds! Propagation from 60deg North is always poor and this weekend was no exception - 10m never opened, and 15m was wierd with signals coming and going all the time. I sometimes felt like a distant voice in the wilderness with a trapped vertical and my trusty HF2V. It was impossible to get a run going on any band and to add to everthing else the power failed on Saturday for 10 hours! And the trip home on the ferry was pretty exciting too.
But would I go back? - yes indeed! I really enjoyed myself in spite of everything. Thanks for all the QSOs - it was great to meet up with Hans MM0XAU again and a real thrill to give a lot of old friends the GZ mult.

There are times when I lose sight of the original reason for this blog. I was inspired to create this blog as a result of a letter to Last Word in RadCom by some prat who didn’t like contests. He wanted to be able to rag-chew with his mate on ‘his frequency’ on 20m each and every day no matter what. I wanted to ask the question, ‘what have you done for amateur radio this month?’, because that guy obviously hadn’t done a great deal.
Anyway, since my last entry I’ve done IOTA and Malcolm GM0DBW has been here to do the IARU. Malcolm’s visit was only the second time I have had a guest operator here. I think and hope he enjoyed himself!
I’ve had no problems really with any of the antennas for the last couple of months and my new K3 arrived two weeks ago, which has replaced the right hand FT1000mp.
I did IOTA from home this year, having had to cancel Shetland for family reasons. It was great fun, and I managed to endure the entire 24 hours without a break. With a final score of just over 1.9 million, as an EU005 entrant I was quite pleased. I think it would have been a good year to be in Shetland as conditions were better than they have been for some years. I certainly don’t have a winning score though, as I have seen an IT9 on 3830 who has beaten me - he has less QSOs and less mults than me, but obviously worked a lot more G’s for 15 points per QSO. I wish I’d been able to work a raft of IT9’s all Sunday morning!!
The K3 finally arrived. It took UPS 9 days to get my radio to me, which I think is ridiculous as another ‘customer’ had his despatched the same day and his took 48 hours to arrive. The box was delayed for 24 hours in California and spent the weekend travelling from East Midland Airport to Germany and back. Their tracking on the web said that their first attempted delivery failed. They claim that I rescheduled delivery for the following day. My house wasn’t empty all week and they never came that day. I phoned them and paid the VAT by credit card. The next day they arrived with the package and demanded the VAT from my son. As he didn’t know why they wanted money (and I would still like to know why) they went away (with the package). I complained that they should have known I had paid – I asked for the driver to return to the house. No, he couldn’t do that. It would be delivered first thing the following day. It arrived at 1600 the following day. This is almost as bad as the time I sent my TS850 for repair to Castle Electronics. The box arrived, but inside the box there was a rusty old car radiator, not my TS850! Even stranger, when I contacted the local courier company who I had used they said, leave it with us and we’ll sort it out. They did. The radio arrived at Castle the following day. What the hell is going on in the courier business!!!? Once again, in my blog, I am only stating facts; you draw your own conclusions!
As regards the K3 itself, I am more than happy. It was easy to assembly (took three evenings), and apart from a small problem with the wrong screws for a particular part, it is a fantastic piece of gear at a reasonable price. I was a little disappointed initially at the physical construction and the way the RF board is attached to the main case, but after talking to someone who is more of a techie than me, I realise that a cast chassis would cost a lot more and would put up the price. The receiver is very quiet, and the filtering is totally configurable. Although I’m not interested in RTTY much, I got it to display RTTY on the screen itself, which is a laugh. There are a few things which need work, as it’s certainly not a direct replacement for the FT1000mp, but who knows? In time it might even replace the left hand radio as the ‘master’. I expect that I will take it on foreign travels too. Now I just need to build the 2m transverter – for me, that’s a big deal, as I don’t like soldering. Watch this space!

Once again the SE beverage has been vandalised by deer! Haven't had a chance to repair it yet. The reflector on the WARC 4 element beam has fallen off and also awaits repair. I enjoyed working the YK9G expedition on quite a few band slots. The RSGB May 144MHz Contest this weekend inspired me to get the 2m gear working again. Haven't been QRV on 2m for years in spite of having all the gear. A very bad SWR was tracked down to the feeder, an aging length of LDF-250, a very rare type of feeder, which I think has finally reached the end of its life. It has been replaced with LDF-450. Using the FT1000mp plus a MM 144/28R driving a Temp 2002. The antenna is a 17 element Tonna at 45-50 feet with a mast-head mounted MGF1302. Certainly hears well, but the transverter was only delivering a watt or two so my overall output was only 25 watts. Still managed to work 23 stations though.
Plans are in place now to do IOTA from Shetland again this year, but from a different location. And the GMDX Convention two weeks ago was well attended. Lots of beer, food and radio banter was enjoyed by all, and it was great to meet some old friends.
The only other radio related activity to note are my attempts to update Logbook of the World. The GM0F QSOs which had been wrongly associated with GM4AFF have now been reloaded and linked to GM0FRT. This was a major operation, and it did not all go well. In fact there are still about 5000 QSOs which have failed to re-link to GM0FRT. This won't be an issue for anyone claiming a QSL but is for us if we want to claim DXCC awards.

The Russian DX Contest went reasonably well. I was a bit disappointed that I was not aware that special contest calls were allowed for this contest. The Ofcom website doesn't show it. Apparently only the new NoV documents show it - and as I'm not the owner of the NoV I hadn't seen it. So I slogged along using GM4AFF and made 1879918 points from 1150 QSOs.
Next day we left on our annual family hols - we flew to Gatwick, then to Jamaica, and spent 2 weeks on Ocean Village cruising the western Caribbean. We visited Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Mexico, Belize, Honduras and Grand Cayman island. This brought my countries total to 104, so I finally cracked the century (long before my 'dead'line!). Now we're back it's taking a long time to get over the jet-lag! As always, my photos are viewable at Flickr.





I did the RSGB RoPoCo 1 Contest on Sunday morning, which was actually very enjoyable - it's a great format for a contest! Sadly WinTest doesn't support it so I did it all manually on the key, which makes it even better! This was immediately followed by the 70 MHz First contest. This was really just a waste of time. Something has happened to 4m over the last 3 years - I can hear a lot of stuff that can't hear me. But I'm sure that they are totally unaware of this. It must be a higher urban noise level, and folk running huge power. Conditions were pretty bad too, which didn't help. So I worked 8 people. GD0EMG was a huge signal throughout, even when he was obviously beaming elsewhere (most of the time), and it took dozens of calls before he heard me. When we were working each other he was 59+10 and he was still missing bits of my info. Now I am running 70 watts to an 8 element yagi - so work it out yourself. There were others who I heard throughout and who I called repeatedly, but who never heard me - G4RFR, G3JHM, G4ADV/P. Something has happened and I don't think it's at my end!
Last night's 80m CC was a laugh - I forgot about it, until I switched on the radio and immediately heard a G3 calling CQ TEST. It happened that I'd left it on 80m CW. There was 30 minutes left, so I started searching and pouncing and (as usual) kept getting beaten up by more 'local' G's. So I called CQ and had a farily exciting run for the last 20 minutes. Nevertheless, it is difficult to get G stations to move quickly - why do people give their calls again before they send the report? I already know who they are, they're wasting time, and upset the run. DL don't do it. Even F's don't do it. In fact no Europeans do it. Why G's? Must be the software they're using - I wonder what it is?...

Just finished a big antenna clean-up in preparation for the Russian DX Contest next weekend. It all began yesterday with a phone call from the farmer up the road who owns the field next door, which contains most bits of my beverages. He had a contractor coming to 'trim' the trees and bushes around the field perimeter, so I had to remove the beverages or get them chewed up. The tree trimmer machine is one of those viscious flailers that just chews up everything in its path.
I made a few QSOs in the Commonwealth Contest and noticed that there will probably be a pretty good competition for the leading positions, with a few stations really doing well, all fairly well matched. That was yesterday - it was probably all different today as conditions will have helped some and hindered others. I didn't get a chance to listen today.
Today began with stringing out the beverages again, and renewing a lot of the supports. I renewed the terminating resistors too. Each Beverage is 520ft long and they run about 145 and 325 deg. Not ideal, but certainly a lot better than some directions. I use Ewes at right-anges to them for the other 90 degree sectors. I also renewed the terminating resistors on the Ewes.
I moved the southerly end of the top band dipole to the other side of the field because I had had complaints that I was coming over on the telephone. The end is a lot lower now, which is a pity. The move solved the problem and actually improved the SWR a little, also moving the resonant frequency to 1850. A bit high, but it'll do for now.
I had had complaints of bad audio on 15m and this was traced to RF getting back down the feeder. I assumed that something was wrong up at the antenna feed point so I lowered and cranked over the tower. I tested the balun and there was about 400M ohms across it. I replaced it with a good spare, cleaned up the feed point, replaced the coax 'joiner' and hey presto, it works like a dream.
All that's left to do is crank up the 40m yagi and that's all the antennas working. Let's hope it stays that way for at least the next week.

I made a short trip to Chisinau, Moldova last weekend while working in Romania. This is my 97th country (www.dxfc.org). This was an incredibly interesting visit for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the train on which I travelled was jacked up and all the wheel bogies were changed over to a different (Russian) gauge. This, to me, is an incredible waste of time and effort, but I still found it fascinating to watch. Although all the passengers remain on the train, it is split into discrete carriages and then shunted down two separate tracks before the jacking-up takes place. So, if you are lucky you can actually see the carriage beside you on the other track getting the same wheel change-over as your own carriage. What a palava! For me this was a new experience, but for those I have told, it's old hat apparently - "Oh that was on Michael Palin's TV program the other week", they say. I never saw it.
The train itself is a perfect example of Russian railway (over-)engineering too, with a coal fire to heat the water at the end of each sleeper carriage, and two attendents per carriage (a uniformed man to collect your passport as required, and a woman to scowl at you as required). I travelled first class and had to share with a nice lady called Elena, who didn't seem to mind the situation too much. She offered to take me out to lunch and show me the sites the next day, which was nice.

Sadly Moldova was a bit of an urban dust-bowl. It was windy and dry and most of the dust was probably cigarette ash from the chain-smoking inhabitants. I had lunch at La Taifas restaurant, which was excellent in many respcts, and a real surprise. I had some "Meat in a mug" (their menu translation), which is a traditional Moldovan dish, and really was nice and tasty. It was really more of a stew in a pot. The wine was completely different to anything I have tasted before - it had an after-taste of plums - and wasn't particularly strong. After a walk around the parks and the craft and flower markets my host and I had afternoon tea in the Nistru Bistro with her son and I caught my train back to Romania.

All-in-all Chisinau was not a tourist destination. There are a lot of military types wearing big hats and the pavements present an interesting combination of people begging beside BMW X5's. There's money about, but those with it are few, and many have nothing. However, I am told that the wine vineyards and cellars make for a very worthwhile weekend trip, so I'll probably be back.

I spent last Sunday morning repairing the 40m and 80m antennas. Wasn't too difficult - the top 27ft of the 80m vertical had bent over when one of the top guys broke in a gale. The end of the driven element of the 402CD popped out - it was straightened, re-inserted and the jubilee clip tightened.
I still have the 15m yagi to sort out - an unknown problem which causes excessive RF feedback in the shack. Probably related to the outer connection of the coax at the balun or antenna.
Received two new FT1000MP filters today - 2khz bandwidth for each IF. Also decided the other day to sell my second FT1000MP and some filters and buy a K3. This should give me a portable radio for travelling, a rig to transvert from and a decent second (or first) radio for SO2R.
I now have the parts required to make an un-un which I will use to split the receive antenna output to allow me to use the receive antennas on both radios simultaeously. The un-un will be able to handle 2kW so it can also be used as a basic two-antenna stack-match if desired.
I gave a talk on contesting at the local club a couple of weeks ago which I hope inspired a few to try that element of the hobby.

I lost the top of my 80m vertical last night so that's 40m and 80m out of action for the moment. AFS CW was fun, but I haven't had a chance to do much - just gave away some points in the 4m Cumulative events. Otherwise, the family have taken priority this month. I gave a talk on contesting last night at the local club, so perhaps that might encourage a few more into contesting.

I had to lower the 40m beam down to 25ft or so on Sunday. It has lost half of one element. It stabbed itself into the ground last Friday, and then fell over and bent itself. Great. The January gales take their toll. Not sure what I'm going to do with it yet, as I need a clear day with no wind or rain to repair it, find out what's wrong with the rotator (see earlier post - rotator indication full scale), and probably re-grease the cables.

I spent 2 hours putting up and attempting to tune an inverted L yesterday morning, in preparation for the Stew Perry Contest contest. I never did manage to get it to resonate in the bottom of 160m, in spite of adding and removing some 40ft of wire in various stages. I gave up. So, I only did a couple of hours using my dipole, which has a very poor SWR just now. I was amazed by how good some of the US stations ears are - they are really weak, and yet they hear me, and I wasn't hammering it. Great fun.
I dismantled the inverted L this morning in the 0 deg C frost. What a total waste of time! Where's my balloon?!