Indigo Foxtrot…

It is always nice to receive QSL cards and the beauty of the bureau system is that you get a lot of cards delivered all at once. It’s great to then look back through the log and remember some of those contacts.

Many contacts can be short & sweet though - this is the case with contest or special event stations who are intent on logging as many contacts as possible as quickly as possible. The cards shown here from OE2008A and HB2008VC are from two such special event stations setup to celebrate the Euro 2008 football tournament co-hosted by Austria and Switzerland. There were many such stations and I received over 30 of their cards in my most recent delivery, a mix of Swiss and Austrian stations for SSB, CW and RTTY contacts.

a selection of the more colourful QSL cards received from the bureau

Here (bottom right) you can also see the card received from Peruvian station OA4WW, this means that of 168 countries logged I now have 151 of them confirmed by paper QSL (rather than some electronic form such as LOTW or eQSL).

Dean Amateur Radio, Pictures bureau, CW, Euro 2008, G0RIF, LoTW, QSL, RTTY, SSB

The sun is showing signs of life. Over the weekend, sunspot 1029 emerged and it is crackling with B and C class solar flares.

The sunspot’s magnetic polarity identifies it as a member of new Solar Cycle 24. If it continues to grow at this rate, sunspot 1029 could soon become the biggest sunspot of 2009.

This and more at SpaceWeather.com.

Dean Amateur Radio, Totally random contest, propagation, Solar Cycle 24, sunspot

Three envelopes containing some 80+ cards arrived at the G0RIF QTH over the weekend. It’s always a nice surprise when cards arrive from the bureau because it only happens about twice a year.

I’ll sift and sort and scan a few and upload a few pictures - there look to be some nice cards in this latest batch, including a new one confirmed in the form of OA4WW (40m CW) in Peru!

Dean Amateur Radio bureau, G0RIF, QSL

A chance to try and work a few new ones. Unfortunately I only heard one station that would have been a new one for me, ST2KSS in Sudan on 15m, a band on which my antenna doesn’t work particularly well. I tried to call him many times but he had lots of loud stations calling him whenever I could hear him (and he was never more than strength 7 with me) so no QSO resulted.

Over the two days (in what amounted to about 2 hours operating) and making only selective calls I logged 35 stations (40m=17 20m=9 15m=8 10m=1) in 32 different countries - they were:-

Aland Islands, Balearic Islands, Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, European Russia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Jersey, Kaliningrad, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Madeira Island, Morocco, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia, Ukraine, USA and Wales.

Not a bad little haul but no new ones. I’ll hope for better luck and better propagation for the CW contest at the end of November!

Dean Amateur Radio antenna, contest, CW, propagation, SSB

I first encountered Spotify about a year ago when a friend sent me a link to the then fledgling website. At that time there wasn’t a great deal of music available and I decided (somewhat hastily it now transpires) not to use it.

A few work colleagues have recently been telling me how much music is now available and how great the site is. Unfortunately, registration to the free service is now by invitation only, so I was starting to think I might have missed the boat (having failed in every attempt to resurrect my old account).

Lady luck was smiling on me though and a colleague of mine was able to secure an invitation through a twitter user he follows and I was by that means able to register today and to start using the free Spotify service.

Regular updates mean that there are songs being added on an almost daily basis, another 40,000 or more today alone. It’s like having the whole of the iTunes store available to listen to, for free, from any PC where you have the client software installed.

I’m going to stick with it this time because if nothing else, it’s a great way to find and listen to new music (quite legally) before committing to a purchase.

Dean Music Spotify, streaming audio

Small but significant, sunspot 1028 of cycle 24 is barely visible in the upper left quadrant of the solar disk but this is the sunspot that has broken a run of 18 consecutive days without any sunspots.

Now if only there could be a few more sunspots emerge over the next few days in the run up to the 2009 CQ World Wide DX SSB contest this weekend…

Dean Amateur Radio, Totally random contest, propagation, Solar Cycle 24, sunspot

post race celebrations

Well it didn’t quite go down to the wire but it was still a very exciting race in Brazil where Jenson Button came from 14th on the grid to finish 5th in the race. With his closest championship rivals Sebastian Vettel and Rubens Barrichello finishing 4th and 8th respectively this put Jenson into an unassailable position in the drivers standings with a lead of 15 points with only one race to go (at Abu Dhabi in November). The pressure of the past few months is now well and truly lifted and as you can see from the post race pictures, this means an awful lot to both Jenson and the rest of Brawn GP.

Rubens was gracious in defeat in what has been a close fight between the two team mates. He said after the race, “I am pleased for Jenson, as a friend, and as a great champion, and if I didn’t win, he should have won it, so well done to him.”

As team principal and owner of Brawn GP, Ross Brawn said, “Jenson’s drive today was the the drive of a world champion.” I’ll echo that and say “Well done Jenson on a great drive in Brazil and becoming the new Formula 1 World Drivers Champion!”

Dean Totally random Brawn GP, Formula 1, Grand Prix, Interlagos, Jenson Button

This in a report yesterday (Wed 14th Oct 2009) at SpaceWeather.com entitled ‘Deep Quiet’. Today will be the 14th such day and there is no sign at the moment of when this streak might be broken.

So far this year, the sun has been spotless 79% of the time, topping the 73% mark recorded in 2008. Cycle 24 seems to be a long time coming and there have been a few false dawns. Long after many forecasters thought that solar minimum would be finished, the quiet is not only continuing, but actually deepening. So much so that some are now asking “are sunspots gone for good?”, as this article on the NASA website explains.

Opinion is divided - those suggesting a decline say that “sunspot magnetic fields are dropping by about 50 gauss per year, if we extrapolate this trend into the future, sunspots could completely vanish around the year 2015″ whereas those with a more positive outlook say that “other indications of solar activity suggest that sunspots must return in earnest within the next year.”

I for one am hoping that the optimists are proved to be correct in their assessment rather than those predicting a gradual decline. Shortwave propagation is much improved when there are lots of sunspots and those of us with modest antennas really need all the help we can get!

Dean Amateur Radio, Totally random antenna, propagation, Solar Cycle 24, sunspot

I seem to recall that’s a line in the song ‘Parisienne Walkways’ by Phil Lynott & Gary Moore. I’m a big fan of both of their work but it’s not for that reason that I chose that phrase when considering a title for this post.

The reason I chose that particular title for this post was because I have literally been looking back at the photographs, photographs I have taken in the years between 2001 and 2005, of business jets (bizjets), mostly at Luton Airport. Due to it’s proximity to London, Luton Airport is the UK centre for business aviation. In addition to the VIP passengers passing through the airport there are also major maintenance facilities based at Luton which account for many of the bizjets visiting the airport.

Dassault Falcon 2000 bizjet

There was a time I was making several visits a year to Luton Airport to photograph (during the time I was semi-seriously into aviation photography) - it’s surprising when looking back just how many pictures I have taken. I have uploaded a selection of the more interesting images to a new picture page entitled BizJets, linked from the Pictures menu above.

Dean Music, Pictures bizjets, Luton, photography

Recent receipt of a few nice QSL cards got me to looking back through my amateur radio station logbook. It shows that September 2009 was a mostly inactive month so far as amateur radio was concerned. ‘QRT’ is amateur radio terminology for ’shutting down’ or ’station off air’ - hence the title of this post.

My logbook shows that between the 29th of August and the 26th of September I didn’t log a single station! I seem to recall that I was a little bit deflated by what I described ‘CQ fatigue’ prior to that period. Maybe I just needed a bit of a break from amateur radio!

My portable operations from Barr Beacon and a brief foray in the CQWW RTTY contest at the end of September certainly made up for that lack of activity with some good contacts and signs of improved conditions on the shortwave bands.

The results of all of that are that I have a number of outbound QSL cards to complete and send to either the RSGB bureau or to the respective stations direct. I can then look forward to the return cards arriving sometime next year with a bit of luck!

In other news, this little update also represents a minor landmark in my blog - the 100th post.

Dean Amateur Radio, Blog portable, Q-codes, QRT, QSL, RTTY