12 QSO's, 9 CW, 3 FT8.
Longest: EA1DR in Spain, 4454 Miles.
This picture sums up the last couple weeks.
I got an alert on my phone just as I turned on the radio. "Transequitorial coronal hole." What's that? It's like a giant belch, spewing forth a blast of solar winds that, as they crash into the magnetosphere, bend the earth's magnetic field, causing mild to moderate geomagnetic storms which tend to rain on the radio wave propagation parade. Great for auroras tho...
It takes some time for solar winds to smash into the earth. More than the 8 minutes it takes light to get here. Solar wind generally travels at around 200 miles per second, so about three days to make the trip from the sun.
But the sunspots have been way down, and other conditions make it seem as if I have no antenna connected.
And ...it's just creepy that it looks like there's a face looking out! He's saying "I'ma eat yo radio waves!"
Some other things: I disassembled the Loop. Yeah. Bummer. I was surprised to see that it performed more poorly than my end-fed wire, both according to my S-Meter on receive and on other folk's meter when I was transmitting. All is not lost. It's still tossed up over that super-high branch. I'm thinking of trying to make it just a really long random end-fed, or some kind of folded dipole. We'll see.
I also got a voltage regulator to power my Cricket 40 from the 13.7 volt power supply. It lets me turn it down to 9V flat, so I can sit there and pound out CQ CQ CQ for 2 hours and not have to buy 100 9-volt batteries to keep the power on.
Well hopefully the sun will start cooperating more...otherwise I'm going to look at home-brewing an amplifier! ha!
Thanks for reading! If we had a QSO this week, thank you!
If we didn't, I hope we do soon.
73!
"This week [...]" is a summary of Radio-related activity from Saturday through Friday.
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