Sunday, 16th April, 2023

Lots of fun today with the radio. Made some nice contacts across Europe, Germany, Italy, Portugal and into Ukraine and Croatia. Plus some more in the UK. I heard lots more in Greece, Spain, Italy, France and even Brazil. However, these were on 10m and it seems no-one could hear me. Not perfect propagation for my low 10W of power. I made contact with someone just down the road on 10m and then I heard them make contact with Brazil, so clearly if you have 100W or more then you can overcome the weaker transmission.

Spent a while listening to a 97 year old in Ireland talking to a “young” 75 year old in England. Made me smile. I waited to speak with them but 40m on a Sunday afternoon is soooo very busy. No sooner than they had stopped about about 10 other people started calling on the same frequency. The little waterfall on my radio shows the whole band is super active, which is great but hard to get a word in!

I found 15m and 17m worked quite well this afternoon, quieter than 40m but people could hear me, vs. 10 and 12m that couldn’t.

Need to sort out my logging arrangements. So far it’s notepad on the computer and then into QRZ.com but would like to pick and use one of the other programs. It’s nice looking up callsigns on QRZ when I hear them.

Looking forward to when 10m does work for me and I make a contact outside the Europe continent.

It’s still amazing how good the long bit of wire is, even though it could be higher off the ground.