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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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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Hello and welcome to Episode 522 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, the hosts take a look at some of the variations of the newly released Fedora 39 distribution. Topics include installation, desktop environments, ease of use, ham radio readiness, quirks and more. A particular focus is the Onyx edition which is an immutable distro option. Thanks for listening and have a great week.

73 de The LHS Crew

As one of my regular readers of the blog, you would know I am a CW buff and the main part of CW is the CW key. For some time now I have been at odds to get the one that works for me. The first key I ever had was the Bencher BY-1 key. It is a very straightforward spring tension key that worked great for me, so what happened to it you ask? As with most of you, I got married, had kids, a job and all the activities that go along with that portfolio. Ham radio was put to the side and things got sold including the Bencher paddle. 

Fast forward to now when the kids are grown, work is no longer and retirement is here. I started to get back into radio again about 4 years before I retired as life did at that point start to slow done. It was time to start looking for a key again. I had read about Begali keys and looked online and decided on their Contour which was magnetic return and not sprin. Me and the key were not getting along very well. I thought it was a matter of adjustment, I had adjusted the contact spacing more than I can remember and I became over time more and more frustrated. I ended up selling the Contour key.

I then move to a solid-state touch key made by 9A5N. This is a very well-made key which is very solid and works as advertised. For me, I could not get the electronic touch adjustment done in a way that would work for me. Seemed it was either too sensitive to touch or not enough, now there was nothing wrong with the key it was just me. With this key, I tried adjusting and adjusting but never could get what I was looking for. I found myself sending extra dits or dahs.

It's very odd as in the past I would have thought a key is a key is a key but not so there is a feel to each of the types of keys and I just had to find a type with the correct feel for me.