52 Week Challenge
Rather than have 1 post per week, I will be posting a weekly update on my progress in the 52 Week Challenge.
Week 1 - Design a QSL card
Job done. The QSL card on the front page is mine…ordered some and so I’ll have to use them now. The JoyPlot is the bit I’m keen on as it comes from the Joy Division album Unknown Pleasures which was done by Peter Saville. There’s a subtle red dot for the QTH and the font is Acid and the logo’s were just turned into single colour ones as opposed to multiple colours.
Week 2 - NCDXF Beacon Listening
Another successful week. I hooked up the IC7300 to Mrs G7KSE’s laptop (she wasn’t impressed) to Faros and let it do it’s thing with the attic antennas. None of which are ideal for beacon monitoring. However the results were really surprising. Stuff that I thought I wouldn’t hear came through quite clear. A typical plot is below
Week 3 - Make a contact with a different continent on 80m or 160m
This is going to be hard. Not because of anything weird, just I don’t have an 80m or 160m antenna. But, this did coincide with our fortnightly radio club meet up and a decent bit of propgation and a contact in Eurpoean Russia at 1285km. Not quite intercontinental but closer than I’ve been before.
Week4 - Research the history of your callsign
Pretty boring this one for me. I’m the only owner and I’ll be keeping it for life. The only interesting part is that there aren’t that many G7’s. That part was reserved for those who didn’t sit th emorse test and were confined to above 30MHz. Fine by me at th etime. Packet was more interesting as was SWL’ing.
Week 5 - Update your profile on QRZ.com, HamQTH.com, etc.
So I keep QSL pretty much up to date. But thgis website is another thing altogether. So the plan is to do a minor edit to QRZ and a focus on moving all the content that sits in all sorts of places onto this. thats a bit more useful I think.
Week 6 - Enter a contest
I do this infrequently, not because I’m keen to score points but for short ones of an hour or so I kind of enjoy it. I’ve dipped in and out of CWT for a while but really wanted to give UKAC another go. I did it quite a bit when the kids were younger but I’ve not done it for a while….so close to a CW contact. Might have to go and do it again if kid transport isn’t on
Week 7 - Where are the DXpeditions?
Probably not one to tax many people. DXWorld has the list. I just never really get to contact them . Can’t be bothered with the bear garden antics for this kind of contact. We’ll elave this one as is I think.
Week 8 - Encourage someone to take their ham radio license exam
I might have to come back to this. Whilst i’ve done it in the past and to be honest I don’t know if that person is active at all, I have been more effective in introducing people to extra parts of the hobby. Like APRS, CW and stuff like SOTA. I still want to do the challenge but I’ll need to find the right person.
Week 9 - Try to work an FM repeater on 10m
Lucky me, on the first attempt when I was at home I tuned into the VE3MMX repeater. Not really expecting to work anyone, but it came in very strong and I made a couple of east Coast contacts with it. I checked back a day or so later, having posted my boast on Mastodon only to find that it was inaudible. Just lucky I guess and I’ve not heard it since!
Week 10 - Listen to an amateur radio satellite
Another straightforward one for me. SO-50 is an absolute bear garden at times so I listend rather than tried to transmit. Over the last few years I’ve tried to TX on it only to find it a bit of a pain, so give up quickly. So to expand this a littel I assembeled the Satellite dish I have in the garage and tried to listen to Oscar-100 with the LNB and RTL-SDR i have. Not a peep, so went round a friends to test it all on his permanent setup. Well it all worked fine. Just can’t seem to get it to work at home. Which is a shame. More to come on that I’m sure.
Week 11 - Receive a weather satellite image
All this asatellite stuff. Dead easy, especially with SatNOGS giving easy access to the APT satellites. To progress this a bit further I looked to improve my Wefax setup and failed at that. Although I have picked it up again and had some much better images using different software.
Week 12 - Make a contact with an “unusual” antenna
Going to come back to this one. I don’t have a suitable tuner at the moment and don’t want to kill off any PA, even if it is a rubbish rig. So will come back to this when I get a new toy.
Week 13 - Make a QSO from an unusual location and post a picture!
I’ve doen this a few times but need to to make this really unusual.The weatehr hasn’t been ideal so I will probably need to figure something out as a SOTA summit or something that I call /p isn’t quite unusual enough
Week 14 - Implement and describe a backup solution for your ham radio log.
I’m not overly fussed about my log book. I use QLog for logging when at home and mixture of paper and phone logging apps for when out xOTA. In the end the logs end up back in QLog. This programme does the backup for me and teh adif is also syncronised to a NAS. If I lose it all I won’t worry too much. There’s plenty of opportunity to look to the future rather than the past
Week 15 - Monitor a transmission and take notes of the field strength
Still need to do this formally, however the simple response would be that I look ast MSF and DCF VLF transmissions regularly to see how things are going, which antenna works best and to basically listen to the beeps.
Week 16 - Make a contact with a xOTA station.
I’ve been ‘doing’ SOTA and WOTA for a long time now. Over a decade, so I have a few contacts to draw on. But for this I did a microwave activation on High Stile and managed 5 QSO’s before moving to other bands. 13cm was the band I used to qualify the summit and I found out that these QSO’s need to be first in the log for the SOTA database to recognise them as a ‘microwave’ activation. Something I’d not done in the past
Week 17 - Which VHF/UHF repeater is closest to your location?
Closest is GM3MX, best signal is GB3GD on the IoM. Despite MX being just a few miles away we are the opposite side of a hill, so very low signal at my end. I can access through a MMDVM but don’t tend to. So maybe I should try and build a longer term solution that has a MMDVM hat running all the time.
Week 18 - Make a QSO in one digital voice mode.
Back to the MMDVM hat here. I do have CFM on the home VHF rig and have only had a handful of QSO’s on it, most of which were through repeaters, I don’t think these count. Alternatively I used LoRa APRS TXRX for general xOTA tracking, so that coounts as well.
Week 19 - Simulate an antenna!
Week 20 - Decode the RTTY transmission of DWD on 10101 kHz
I need to remember this…FLdigi settings are 450Hz shift, 50 bd, 5N1. Simple reception
