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.
✅ is done 🚧 is work in progress ❌ is not started
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.
Week 4 - 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 the morse test and were confined to above 30MHz. Fine by me at the time. 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 this 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 have 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 listened 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 little I assembled 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 a satellite 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 done this a few times but need to to make this really unusual.The weather 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 the 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 counts 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.
Week 21 - Create a GNU Radio flowgraph ✅
Wow, I think I’ve done this in the past but really couldn’t remember doing it. I ended up following a tutorial and in about 15 minutes and not quite adding in the right value in one block (Ooops - The output was OoOoOoOoOoO etc) it all worked. An RTL-SDR is now playing a local FM radio station. amazing!
Week 22 - Simulate an electric circuit 🚧
Ok so this one will be a bit of work in progress. I think I want to build a bandpass filter for either my APRS LoRa station or my Meshtastic one, just to see if it improves things. But this will need a bit more research I think as normal HF type filtering probably isn’t the right thing, so maybe its not a great one for the first circuit. Either way I’ll be using the recommended CircuitLab
Week 23 - How many language can you hear on the radio this week? ❌
TBD when I get a moment to turn the radio on properly. I suspect it’ll be local Europeans on the ham bands and all sorts of languages on teh broadcast bands, I maybe need a translator to work out what they are :-).
Week 24 - Make a contribution to an Open Source ham radio software package ✅
I think I’ve got this covered. In the past I’ve made contributions to the Open Source radio Wiki as well as the SatNOGS database. For non coders like me these are some of the less well loved contributions, documentation. I see these as important as the code itself. If I can’t follow it because it is in Tech Jargon, then its probably ripe for a bit of normal speak. Especially if they are wiki type things.
Week 25 - Locate local noise sources in your shack/flat/house ✅
Using GM3SEK’s advice in his Clean Up Your Shack blog I went round the house to identify noise sources. There are always a few ’new’ wall warts that are a bit noiser than others and I find that noise at my QTH is transitory around Christmas and Halloween with cheap Amazon tat that gets used for lights. 30m is always knackered compared to other bands and I guess this is ADSL but its been hard to prove it. Needless to say when we had a recent power cut it was beautifully quiet here.
Week 26 - Observe the solar data such as sunspot number, flux, K and A values over the week ❌
Week 27 - Listen to the July 2025 SAQ transmission ❌
Week 28 - Receive a station on 6m via sporadic E ❌
Week 29 - Make your own xOTA activation ✅
Been doing this a while. At some point I’ll make it to mountain goat but thats not the motivation for me. I enjoy being on the Fells and whilst I’m not out as much as I was 3 years or so ago, I get out. Wainwrights and Summits are my usual targets but more recently I’ve done a couple of Parks, but there are just too many of them for me.
Week 30 - Make a contact with another participant of the challenge ❌
Week 31 - Try a mode you have never tried before. Hellschreiber? JT65? ✅
New to me. FT8. I’ve not really been a fan of point and click type modes. PSK31 was as close as I used to get earlier in the century. But my new zBitX has FT8 built in so I thought I’d give it a go. Whilst its not exactly my cup of tea it could be a useful mode for POTA or SOTA if I’m struggling to get contacts. I can’t see it being a primary more though. One mode I’ve fancied having a go at is Hell. I must make some time for that.
Week 32 - Listen to a broadcast station from another country ✅
Like DD1MAT, I listened to the Antarctic broadcast from Ascension island and the UAE (as well as the UK). This broadcast by the BBC send messages to those overwintering in the various Antarctic bases. Its probably not necessary nowadays but is a lovely thing to do for those who must be incredibly isolated. I’ve missed the love broadcast so many times and Cerys Matthews is a regular on 6Music for me. Will listen again!
Week 33 - Build an antenna and make a contact with it ✅
Every time I make an HF contact at home it is with a home made antenna. A W3EDP at home and various end fed or vertical antennas for HF portable. The only commercial antenna I have for ham stuff is the white stick for VHF & UHF. Its been battered by the wind and a bit wonky now but still works fine. For xOTA VHF I use a flowerpot antenna that uses a 3D print which is also my answer to HC43.
Week 34 - Match an impedance ❌
Week 35 - Receive a weather fax transmission on HF ✅
He He…easy peasy. Love a bit of WeFax
Week 36 - Operate your whole station from battery power for one day ❌
Week 37 - Work 10 DXCCs on FT8 ❌
Week 38 - Make a contact on Morse code ✅
Made several of these, when I do TX I tend to aim for CW and whilst my skills go up and down through lack of consistent use I can muster a rubber stamp QSO relatively easily, although I do need a bit of a run up every now and again. SOTA and more recently POTA chasing has been a thing for me. Not really fussed about clocking up loads of points or QSO’s just like to give the activator a QSO as I know it can be a frustrating thing on a summit when you have 3 out of the 4 contacts you need in the pouring rain 🏞️
Week 39 - Make a 2-way contact with an output power of 100 mW or less ✅
Does Meshtastic count? if so then its a done deal. Otherwise my UHF LoRa APRS tracker is 100mW max. I’ve used a rockmite for a 30m CW QSO but that’s nearer 300mW and hard on the ears 👂
Week 40 - Which QSLing methods do you use, physical and electronic? ❌
Week 41 - Write a poem on your biggest ham radio pet peeve! ❌
Week 42 - Receive a SSTV image ✅
Wow what a faff Linux can be some times. Tried using QSSTV but could not get it to load up the USB audio. So used a Windows 10 VM and MMSSTV and finally got a decode. Couldn’t get it to transmit from MMSSTV so maybe something to add on to the to do list for the future (when I have a free year or so - sort out linux sound :-))
Week 43 - Create a 3D printable design related to ham radio ✅
Done a few 3D prints for ham radio. I keep the useful ones on Printables and am usually work (slowly) on something. Recently enclosures for APRS trackers or portable Meshtastic nodes have been taking up a bit of my time. These aren’t particularly complex to design or print but making a common design has been a bit more time consuming than I had thought.