Christmas Presents

The weather before Christmas was quiet and suitable for maintaining antennas. So I improved the matching of my 160m inverted L-antenna to get some more DXCC entities during the days off. Conditions on Top-Band were very good at a K-index of 1 and the signals, especially from Asia, were very loud in times. The following 6 new countries have been logged: Mozambique (C93PA), Azores (CU3EQ), Mongolia (JT1CO), South Korea (HL5IVL), Taiwan (BV1AP), Mexico (XE1TD). Also four new Zones for 160m WAZ (03 / 06 / 23 / 37) and seven new US-States for the 160m WAS were worked: Arkansas (K5GO), California (K6RW), Colorado (K0RF), Michigan (K8TLC), Minnesota (K0TT), Montana (KM7W) and Utah (WA7LNW). It was interesting to see how the terminus of the greyline correlated with the higher signal strengths (see picture).

2017-12-24_160_JATalking about 2m I concentrated to EME during the days between Christmas and New Year. The moon was in good position with low degradation and finally 43  initial callsigns, several new WW-locator and two new DXCC entities found the way into the log. After several tries I was very happy to work Ricardo, LU7FA, on Dec. 27 for DXCC #67 and Bing, YC2MDU, on Dec. 31, 2017 for DXCC #68. It is interesting to mention that LU7FA has just 2 antennas and YC2MDU using just 400 W output. Two great belated Christmas gifts and a happy ending 2017.

FT8-Awards by FT8-DMC

Normally CW is my favourite mode, but but from time to time I use digital modes on Hf like PSK31/PSK63 for example to complete the white spots for my DXCC-Award. Talking about HF-bands I never saw any use of JT65-modes here because for me it is much too slow compared to a nice CW contact. With the availability of the new mode FT8 things changed. The software based on a FSK 8 tone code, an occupied bandwidth of 47 Hz and a 15 second tournaround! This increased the activity dramatically and even rare DX-stations appeared and uses FT8 mode.

These days Joe, OE4VIE, has initiated the FT8-DMC Club and offer some very nice and colourful, free of charge pdf-Awards. They pushed the activity right again, not to say there is a real FT8 hype now. The WAC Award (Worked all Continents) is not a challenge at all, because it could be worked within an hour by a well equipped station. The DXCC Award is even more difficult and issued for contacts with 100 DXCC entities, like the original by ARRL.

2017_FT8_WAC 2017_FT8_DXCC100