January Goals Recap

Being as its now officially the end of January I thought I’d share some feedback on how I’m getting on with my goals for this year. I guess at this point I should be coming up with some good excuses but I can’t think of any and I’ve not done so well.

I’ve yet to seriously start revising for the Advance amateur radio exam but the Harwell ARS Rally is coming up this month, and I’m hoping I can kick start it then by purchasing the latest edition of the training book, my plan then is to write up my notes as blog posts and stick them up here.. I guess we’ll see how this works out at the end of February.

I have started on learning CW using http://www.lcwo.net, but struggling slightly as I find after I get to about lesson 6-7 and more letters/numbers are introduced they all merge together in my head and it confuses the heck out of me, it’s something I’m sure I will overcome in time.

My targets for 1 QSO a day was for me optimistic, some weeks I’ve managed to get on lots and others I’ve failed miserably  I can report I’ve made 230 QSOs which to me seems like a small amount and I want to improve on it. Maybe with some improved sunspot numbers it will help?

So let’s hope February can set me on the right track.

BARTG Sprint RTTY

This weekend was host to the yearly BARTG Sprint RTTY, I decided to spend a couple of hours in the shack working the odd station I could hear. What I was pleased to find was that 15m and I made a number of QSOs into North America, 20m was also reasonable maybe a sign of conditions starting to pick up who knows.

Ended up with 80 QSOs, mixed across 40m to 15m.

Summary:

	QSO	DX	JA	W	VE	VK	Cont
40m	8	7	0	0	0	0	1
20m	67	28	0	4	1	0	4
15m	5	1	0	3	0	0	1
Total	80	28	0	6	1	0	4

Score: 80*(28+0+6+1+0)*4 = 11200 points

ARRL RTTY Roundup

Last weekend was the yearly ARRL RTTY Roundup, which I decided to have a dabble in, I found conditions very poor at best although managed to work 9M2 and E21. I was pleased that I managed to work some stations on 80m as the Windom seems to preform very poorly on this band.

Total operating time was around 4 hours give or take and summary below shows a very poor effort in my view.

 MODE   QSO S/P DXC DUP  POINTS   AVG
--------------------------------------
   80     3   0   2   0       3  1.00
   40    51   1  19   0      51  1.00
   20    48   0  10   0      48  1.00
   15     0   0   0   0       0  0.00
   10     0   0   0   0       0  0.00
--------------------------------------
TOTAL   102   1  31   0     102  1.00
======================================
         TOTAL SCORE : 3 264

Equipment: Yaesu FT950, 80m Windom, MixW for logging.

Goals for 2010

As we move into another year I’ve decided to set myself some goals to give me some focus, I hope I can achieve them and I’ll keep everyone regularly updated.

Revise and sit Advance Exam

After sitting the Intermediate exam at the RSGB Convention back in October 2009, I’m feeling keener then ever to finally take the last step to get a Advance (Full) UK amateur radio licence. I know from others that its quite a lot to learn and remember but I’m willing to give it a go and try and sit the exam at the 2010 RSGB Convention. this gives me 10 months to soak in all the information and swat up on my math skills.

Step 1: buy the revision book!

Learn Morse Code

Finally learning the code is something I want to do, and the guys down at G6PZ keep telling me to sort it out so I can take part in the CW Contests with them.

1 QSO Per Day Target

Last year my QSO number wasn’t that great outside of contests so this year I want to make at least 1 QSO per day every day so that’s a minimum of 365 QSOs personally I’m hoping to do more then that plus contest activity, it would be well into the thousands..

Launch Callbook.org.uk

Callbook.org.uk has been plagued with issues from the start mostly caused my Ofcom revoking the application process to access UK Callbook data and never doing anything more about it. I’m keen as ever to start this project and I’m going to be looking further into gaining the information from Ofcom and also including a number of other countries around Europe (If anyone has sources please let me know).

This will be no doubt a long process but I’m willing to give it another go, I can only hope Ofcom has a change of attitude in the coming months.