The bands will come alive

This weekend is the running of the CQ World Wide DX CW contest that runs for the entire weekend. Now those of you who are not into contesting then it's off the SSB portion, digi portion or the WARC band. But you don't have to be a contesting nut like me to be excited about this contest. This is a chance to find and make contact with some very decent DX. It will give you a chance to line your DXCC pockets, work all states award, work all zones award, place your rig in QRP or QRPp power and see how many miles per watt you can do and the list goes on. Not too great at CW you say, well there are some very decent code reader software out there that also send code as well. Chances like this only come now and then.

As for me I am going to be for the weekend and hope to do well and have a lot of fun while I am at it. Cheers and have a good weekend for those in the U.S. Happy Thanksgiving!

Each Monday morning at 1300Z and 1900z I take part in the 1-hour medium-speed CW contest or MST as it is called. Medium speed is 25wpm or less and the exchange is your name and progressive contact number or serial number as they call it in contesting. During the mini contest this morning I was calling "CQ MST" and as always I also have loaded on my PC screen the reverse beacon network website as seen in the picture above. This allows me to see how my signal of 100 watts is getting out. This morning as I was calling on 20m I was shocked to see my signal strength into ZL4YL New Zealand and MM0ZBH Scotland.

This weekend the LZ dx contest was up and running, I have never taken part in this contest and I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of activity. It's a 24-hour contest that started at 8 am out my way and it gave me a nice workout for the upcoming weekend for the CQ World Wide DX CW contest. I took part for about a total of 4 hours and made 120 contacts for a score of 13,110. 

Midway into the contest I was taken down a side road for a pleasant surprise. At some point on Saturday afternoon calling CQ contest was slowing down on 20m. I decided to make a left turn and head down the 10m side road. There were very few LZ contesters there but I did notice a commotion on the waterfall. When I went to investigate it was H44WA DXpedition in the Soloman islands calling CQ North America (CQ NA) and he was all alone. I put the Icom 7610 in split and dual mode (hearing both VFOA and VFOB) and made the mental change from CW contesting to CW DXpedition. After a few short tries, I was in the log. I was glad I made a left turn and took a side road from the contest.

In this episode, we join Martin Butler M1MRB, Chris Howard (M0TCH), Martin Rothwell (M0SGL), Frank Howell (K4FMH) and Leslie Butterfields (G0CIB)  to discuss the latest Amateur / Ham Radio news. Colin Butler (M6BOY) rounds up the news in brief and in the episode's feature is YouTube Channels for Ham Radio

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• C6AQQ New Providence Island
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AmateurLogic.TV Episode 187 is now available for download.

Tommy builds the M5 Ham Radio project. George makes a high quality 4:1 Balun. Mike assembles a Buck/Boost converter device for use with QRP operations.

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