6M opening to Newfoundland

I worked VO1NM up in Newfoundland this evening. There was a larger opening to Europe earlier in the day, but by the time I got home from work it was already starting to fade. I heard an HA3 (Hungary), but he was very weak.

I took a quick video of my QSO with VO1NM, he was S9+20 at times. He sounded as loud as a local. After me, you can barely hear WZ1V work him as well. Ron was off the back of the beam, so not as loud as he normally would have been.

Friday 6M opening into Europe

This past Friday, the 22nd of June, there was a fantastic opening into Europe during the evening hours. It seemed to be favoring the British Isles, as I have never worked so many G's in my life! A fair amount of them were CW, as sloppy as my skill are.

Here is the final tally:


PA2M - CW
PA7MM - SSB
CT8/K0RUI - SSB
VO1NM - SSB
EI4KF - SSB
G4WJS - CW
ON7GB - CW
PA0RDY - CW
EI9E - CW
G4FGK - SSB
G4WJS - SSB
G0LGS - SSB
GN7GB - CW
G4RGK - CW
G4IFX - SSB
G4RRA - CW
GM3YTS - CW
G0JHC - CW

I also heard an F8 towards the end, but never managed to work him. The Eu openings seem to favor EA and CT from this location, so it was quite a nice surprise to hear that far north.

K4MHZ 2M beacon heard in FN42la

At around 10pm local time, I started hearing the K4MHZ/B in FM25 in Hatteras, NC on 144.300. This is somewhat of an amazing feat for me, since I have such a relatively small antenna system. I'm only running 12 elements up around 25 feet. This beacon is nearly 800km from my location in FN42la.

Here is a short Youtube video that I took of the audio.

This is what the APRS propagation logger looked like at the time. The beacon is basically at the very tip of the large red lobe.

June VHF Contest 2012

This past weekend I operated up at K1WHS in FN43mj. We decided that it would be a laid back weekend and we would do a few repair jobs and take it easy operating. The weather was absolutely perfect the whole weekend and we had a great time. We several cocktail hours and did some pretty good damage on a bottle of Bombay Sapphire. It was a small crew, just 4-5 of us. Dave, KM3T, came up for his first time on Saturday and had a lot of fun working 2m and a big part of the 6m opening. 6 was open for a long period on Saturday and we were working guys all over. We called it quits early (11pm) and some of them started back up around 6am. I decided to sleep it and didn't wake up 'till 8am. We started right back into relaxation mode, only sitting in front of the 222 and 432 positions for 20-30 minutes at a time. 6 would open up for a little bit here and there, and then we ended up working a really nice opening to Europe. Art, K1BX, worked over 60 stations and numerous grids well into eastern europe. When that died down, 6 was really slow, so we decided to go out to lunch. We got back around 2:30pm and 6 was still dead, but soon opened up in a big way.

At the end of the day we had 1200+ Q's and 305 grids on 6m alone. Our score was somewhere north of 750k.

The only downer for the weekend was that we didn't have any microwaves. The rotor for the microwave stack self-destructed sometime last year and Dave had to take it down off the tower on Saturday. He thinks it can be rebuilt, we'll be back on the microwaves for September.