Thursday, June 20, 2013

Day two with a good propagation to US

Several days ago I was asked if the propagation between NA and VK works in our local late afternoon.  Now I can safely say... yes it works if the US station stay awake for a while...


So the answer is YES for sure.

TU all and 73
Patrick

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Pleasant surprise - 20 m propagation to US

The local time is 16:30 and I would expect the LP Europe will be booming.  But instead I got few calls from North America... Nice surprise and thanks OMs for the calls.


73 and hope to see you all again.


Monday, June 17, 2013

All Asia CW contest.

On Saturday I found some free time and decided to have some practice in contesting and at the same time to give some numbers out.


        Band    QSOs    Pts  WPX
           7        1            1      1
          14       1            1      1
          21     169        169   79
          28       2            4      2
       Total     173       175    83

       Score : 14,525

Ten meters band was very disappointing... However it was very pleasant to work Japanese stations.. They certainly behave like true gentlemen.

VK2PN Max Rates:

2013-06-15 0330Z - 3.0 per minute  (1 minute(s)), 180 per hour by VK2PN
2013-06-15 0336Z - 1.6 per minute  (10 minute(s)), 96 per hour by VK2PN
2013-06-15 0341Z - 0.9 per minute  (60 minute(s)), 54 per hour by VK2PN

That run at 0.9 QSO per minute sustained for the whole hour was good fun.

Total Time On was 04:17  (257 mins)

Thanks everybody who called me.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

The K3 is repaired

Only yesterday I've unpacked the radio(s) from their traveling cases and put them on the bench.
The poor K3 is deaf... I can hear (or see on the P3) the signal but it is way down.  So I've pulled out all the manuals and started reading.  The fault must have been most likely in several PIN diodes switching/routing the signal.  The first diode (D25) took quite while to find but ... hey it was damaged:

 The little bulge on the middle is the spot which left the smoke out.

I was lucky to have another two in stock from previous "accident".  I'm not telling how it happened... it was me being silly and careless.

 Here is the new diode in place... I'm not that proud about the soldering... but it works..


There you see "the happy family" again... The smile on my face is pretty happy too.  It feels good to fix something so important as radio... eh?

Just worked II1TLC Luc 599 both way via  LP.  Life is good again..



The results of the Commonwealth contest were published.

  As I member of the team Australia 2, I was quite pleased with the result.