AmateurRadio.com

Oh joy, my email seems to have been hacked into.
Apologies to anyone who has received any helpful advice they didn’t really want from my account.

I’ve spent the best part of an hour changing passwords and resetting things and this site hold no ‘email-able’ information so there shouldn’t be any coming through but if you’ve been got then I apologise and I’d like to say it’ll never happen again but you know how it is.

It happened at 8.37am today and the password was changed by 9am so it was the best I could do.

Very annoyed about it!

It been a real pleasure to be operating the GB4LBC special event station for SOS radio week today. With just a long wire and 100w we had our own little pile up which lasted pretty much all day.

The station will be up and running again tomorrow on 40m and hopefully will be just as popular. The Workington and district club (MX0WRC) is operating 3 of the 4 stations in Cumbria

GB1LBC – Silloth
GB2LBC – Workington
GB4LBC – St Bees
GB5LBC – Barrow in Furness

GB5LBC is operated by our friends at Furness ARS and we managed to have a quick QSO during the pile up

This year Workington and District are joining up with Barrow in Furness club to extend the amount of stations we activate. We are operating from Silloth GB1LBC, Workington GB2LBC, St Bess GB4LBC and Barrow GB5LBC lifeboat stations from the 21st to the 29th January in a relaxed style. hopefully making htis years SOS radio week a bigger event locally.

The purpose of our time on the air as special event stations is to promote the RNLI  as a charity, something that costs £300,000 a day to run!

St Bees will only be running at the weekends and We are looking to be on mainly 40m and 80m but the Cobwebb is coming with me so there is a possibility of something on the higher bands but it really depends on the weather as high winds will certainly destroy it.

I hope to work as many as possible in between cups of tea and choccy biccies and if you would like to make a donation then it would be really appreciated. Keep an eye out on the status monitors to see when we’re up and running.

There re just a ton of data modes you can play with and this morning was the turn of JT65-HF to be on my screen. I’d installed it quite a while ago and not used it for some months but I thought I could do with giving it a quick run through to remind myself of the protocols in case we use it on the SOS radio week operations (as GB4LBC for St Bees lifeboat station).

Time is very important with JT65 and a few other modes and I’ve never been a big fan of windows time setting utility. It never seems to be right and there is always a problem with either this or that. I use Dimension 4 on XP machines and it works very well. Under Windows 7 you have to remember to run it as an administrator so I suspect the same will be true for Vista. there seemed to be a bit of a conflict going on on my puny little computer so I had to reinstall JT65-HF and only then did it start to decode the received signals.

I took the opportunity to use my stealth antenna (A Watson 80 plus 2 dipole – which is really only good for 20m here) and immediately got a contact with DG8RW & W3PV with 15 watts. I had a bit of trouble with the first contact as he couldn’t copy my signal report for a while and I had to resend it quite a few times before he got it. Eventually we got a QSO together and that was pretty pleasing.

So I’ve got my hands dirty again with JT65 and whilst its not the most interactive of modes it reinforces the fact that SSB is inefficient in comparison as I doubt I’d have got where I did with 15 watts and a loft mounted antenna. Still, it was a nice distraction from what I should have been doing. That was to be revising for an exam on Tuesday. Nothing exciting, a professional exam and much less enjoyable that playing with radios.