Good old 80m
I’ve not done much with amateur radio these past few years. There have been plenty other interests to keep me occupied in what scarce free time I have. But, having recently divested myself of hosting and administering the VK-VHF mailing list I’ve decided that I should use that new acquired spare time to try and get my CW skills up to speed - so to speak.
It’s now 33 years since I passed my UK 12 wpm morse exam at Stonehaven Radio (and became GM4DSZ). Having been mostly interested in VHF when living in the UK, I really only used CW when aurora were around. … and I’ve not used CW much at all in the past few decades.
Now, being involved with the implementation of a new data network at work utilising a dual 10 gigabit/s backbone, there seems to be some sort of inverted perversity to getting my morse speed up to, say, 30 words per minute ( ~ 30 bits / second).
I’ve spent some time over the past few days just tuning around various HF bands just to reacquaint myself with band conditions.
… and its been pretty quiet overall.
Just ten minutes ago I was tuning around 80 m - I heard two VK SSB nets on the go and one CW station. Nothing else. Nada. Zilch.
But the CW station on 3509 khz (RST 529 at 1057 UTC) turned out to be W1FV calling CQ DX!!! That’s a fair haul from here (in QF59). Good old 80 m. Now, where on earth is my Bencher keyer?
