RTTY activity on 20m…
The past few nights I’ve turned on the TS-480 and as I often do, tuned up and down the 20m RTTY sub-band. For the first time in a long while I found a good spread of stations across the band on both evenings.
As usual European signals were very loud, north and south America were well represented and there were a number of Asian stations in there too (mostly Japanese). I can’t remember when I last found this level of activity on quiet weekday evenings. But, mine is not to reason why so I got stuck in and worked a few, logging SV5/DL3DRN, E78CB, IK4JQS, S57UX, EA8AJO, CX6DAP, IY3GM, EA3DUM, S52R, N7GLR, EA9CF and CT1EEK amongst others. The highlight of the two nights though was a really long chat with HA5UY (Gyuri) near Budapest - I will certainly look forward to meeting him on the air again and chatting some more.
I do now wonder to what extent the new (or should I say ‘reconfigured’) antenna is making a difference, or is it just that conditions were favourable? Who knows. I will just hope that there are more nights like these in the future because it’s a lot more fun than tuning across a dead band!