GW4VXE's Station Diary

Conditions must have been a little better this morning as when I called Graeme VK5GG on 20m CW he could hear me. Not well, but well enough to swap reports and say a quick hello. Tuned down the band a bit and could hear ZL1HJ again, in conversation with a French station. ZL1HJ, interestingly, seemed a little weaker than yesterday, I heard him say he was beaming over the North Pole.

Had a bit of a play in the 13z CWT. It was fairly poor towards the east coast of North America and I stayed on 20m - 15m was devoid of any activity as far as I could tell. It was nice to work Jim K6AR, who I'm guessing was coming through long path. Also interesting to work Alex RU0LL who's over on the Pacific Coast of Russia.

A short sked with Roger GW5NF today. Initially he was struggling to hear me, but I think that was down to static crashes and noise at his end. There was a thunderstorm over Devon and heading towards south eastern Wales at the time. We chatted for a few minutes until the flashes got brighter at Roger's end....

Saw that Darrel AA7FV had been on 17m in the late afternoon here and tried a CQ call where he'd been and was delighted to hook up with him. It was our first QSO since he'd joined FOC, but it was just nice to catch up and swap news. It's been a while since I heard him with decent signals with the conditions as they've been.

The 19z CWT was a bit of a surprise! Conditions on 15m were considerably better than I was expecting! The band was decent into Arizona and California and HD8R from Galapagos was totally unexpected.