GW4VXE's Station Diary

HF conditions haven't seen great today and also the bands have been noisy with strong winds affecting the overhead power lines.

Had a nice chat with Roger GW5NF on 80m. He reminded me that there is a CE0 expedition on at the moment. I ought to try and track them down. It's not a bad path from here. I remember my first QSO with Easter Island as G4VXE on 10m CW using an ex-CB aerial back in around 1983/1984.

Just had a quick look on DXWorld for details of the CE0 expedition. I can only see SSB spots, so I won't be worrying about that. No complaints - there are enough expeditions that spend little time on SSB in favour of either CW or FT8!

Not everyone feels the same way. I saw a comment under a post about an FT8 operation yesterday, 'Is he on SSB?', with a bit of a tone that he should be! The DX station in question was running low power at a fair distance on VHF, some 700km away. Well good luck with working that on 2m SSB in flat conditions. If you really want to work someone, surely you'd use the most appropriate mode available....rather than trying to persuade a DX station to waste their time on a mode that isn't suited to the propagation. Rant over!

A couple of nice CW QSOs in the late afternoon; K2JVB doing POTA from NY state and Ben EA8/G4WDZ/P running 5W from the Canaries. He was peaking up nicely at times.

By 2000z W1AW code practice was just audible on 17m, but nothing really doing on CW on the band, so dropped down to 20m and had a nice chat with PP5WX and worked a couple of POTA portables in Florida.