G EU Area DX Mult 80m 0 3 0 0 3 40m 0 17 0 3 16 20m 0 28 0 8 27 15m 0 8 0 2 8 10m 0 3 0 0 3 Total 0 59 0 13 57 Score: (0+59*2+0*2+13*3)*57 = 8949 points
Total QSOs: 72
Total Time: 2 hours
Equipment: Yaesu FT950, 80m quarter wave L, 80m Short Windom and MixW
After being back nearly 3 weeks from the annual family visit to North East, Scotland or more precisely Elgin I thought I’d share what I had gotten up to, If you follow me on Twitter you might have spotted the odd tweet with a photo or some 140 character post saying how I was enjoying yet another dram or a pint!
This wasn’t the sole purpose of the trip mums side of the family are all based up in Elgin and surrounding area, plus I’m actually a Scot although lived in England for 99.9% of my life so far, so I can only declare that by birth certificate these days!
During the day was spent day tripping and we did manage to cram quite a bit in visiting Glen Moray & Benromach distillery, Inverness & Fort George, Aberdeen, and Lossiemouth a couple of times for walks along the beach but care had to be taken as there was plenty of heavy showers!
As we were staying at my grandmothers there’s always a possibility of taking some radio gear and doing some operating the last couple of years this was using a 2m handheld radio which is usually hardly ever used due to lack of activity.
This trip was slightly different though the shack had recently acquired a Yaesu FT-817ND, which is perfect size for travelling specially as I normally travel around on the train so with that and a quickly made nested dipole for 20 & 40m I was already to operate as 2M0SQL/P.
The antenna was setup in as an inverted V in gran’s back garden which seemed to work reasonably during the week I made a mixture of QSOs in both SSB & PSK although conditions did seem rather poor, it was a nice way to pass a sometime in the evenings.
What I did learn from the trip was that it would be nice to have antenna which covered a larger number of bands and since Dad (M3JFM) and myself have been looking at the possibility of picking up an MP-1 vertical, so keep an eye out to see what we’re using on future visits.
If you follow me on Twitter you might have noticed the tweet saying that I’ve taken over running HamTwits.com from Ben (N1WBV) who started it back in 2008 and has done a cracking job providing a list of radio hams who use Twitter, hopefully I can maintain the useful service and add a bit more functionality to it at, the moment users are manually added, I plan on making this automated using the Twitter oAuth system and giving it a fresh look.
Hopefully I can get this done in the next couple of weeks, in the mean time if you’d like to be added either send me a message on Twitter or leave a message in the comments!
Its been over a month since I did a follow up post regarding the Eumetsat Eumetcast receiving station which I know have fully running, the whole process of setting it up was relivity easy once I’d bought all the bits needed, the only bit I had to wait for was the EUMETCast Key Unit plus software which took about 2 weeks, this was probably caused by me requesting permission to upload the images to my website for non commercial use.
Equipment wise I ordered:
*Included MSG Data Manager, MSG Animator, GeoSatSignal
So the total outlay was £357.44 but in my opinion it was well worth it, there really is nothing like getting weather satellite images of earth from space and watching the weather change over time plus helps improve your geography of knowing where places are located.
As I’ve got the approval from the Eumetsat legal department I’m also able to upload the MSG series images every 6 hours you can find those at http://wx.magicbug.co.uk/msg/images/ I’ve not had time to make a pretty web page for displaying them so its currently just folders but that setup will come in time.
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