GW4VXE's Station Diary

I've been rather quiet with my updates for a little while. I've been a bit preoccupied, to be honest!

I think I mentioned some health issues. Well, the investigations into this morphed into a MRI and then a biopsy, looking at whether I had Prostate Cancer. Following the MRI, it looked like I did and for about a month, that was the very unpleasant possibility that we were looking at. Yesterday, Julie and I met with the consultant to discuss the biopsy results. To our huge surprise and delight, only a very minor amount of cancer was detected and at such a low level, the consultant wasn't concerned. Major relief for us both, I can tell you.

The original issue that sparked the investigation remains to be solved, but a fairly simple operation can correct this, so hopefully that can be done shortly and the whole episode put behind us.

In the background, I have been on the radio! It's been a good summer for 6m and I've been pleased to work a couple of new countries; 3A (Monaco) and VP2M (Montserrat) on the band. There's been loads of Es. It's tailed off a bit now, but even today there have been stations to work.

I spent a bit more time on 70MHz FT8 this summer too! I found that the FTDX-10 and the 40m dipole worked ok to make a few QSOs here and there and I've worked a few new squares on the band.

HF has been fairly poor over the summer. Conditions seem to be starting to change a little bit now. In the CWT session on Wednesday evening, I worked a couple of west coast NA stations on 15m for the first time in a few weeks. The RI1FJL expedition to Frans Josef Land has been very QRV and I was pleased to work them on 15m FT8 for a new DXCC from Wales, followed shortly after by a 20m FT8 QSO. As ever it will be nice to pick up a CW QSO if possible.

Well, hopefully updates will be a bit more frequent again now.