Hello Lowfers,
another exciting and successful weekend!
Operational:
First of all thanks to the GD-gang for all the excitement and activity you
created! I thought about you three when I stepped out onto my balcony on
Friday night for a minute to see how the weather was and stood in the snow
and freezing winds. I quickly went back to my cozy warm shack and heard you
guys, telling that you was operating on the beach! I had an excellent QSO
with David, GD0MRF Friday night with good reports on both sites. I also
realized the strong QSB. Especially during my QSO with Graham, GD3XTZ on
Saturday it was about 20 dB! BTW: Your best signal report here was -94 dBu,
which is exactly one dB better than MM0ALM. What was your exact
QTH-locator, I assume the distance must have been very close to 1000km.
With IK5ZPV I worked my first Italian station LF/LF (we had a crossband QSO
LF/160m before). Valerio and I had a crossmode QSO CW/Slow-CW on136.900 kHz
Sorry for any inconvenience or confusion this has caused to others but I
think Valerio has strong QRM in the upper part of the band.
Tried to work OH1TN, but the QSO was incomplete because I was unable to
copy my report (Reino, we will give it another try!). However I completed
my first normal CW QSO with HB9ASB.
I missed the time-out of DCF39 on Saturday morning that was reported
earlier. However, despite living only 120 km away from that transmitter and
despite of its strong signal strength I seem to suffer less from QRM than
the poor guys living in the Frankfurt area.
Technical:
I modified the RF amplifier/preselector of my old Teletron LWF45 (2 x EF93
tubes!) to feed my MV62. With the characteristics of the pre-selector
consisting of three tuned circuits (I will publish more details on the
shape of the filter curve on my homepage
http://home.t-online.de/home/dk8kw/new.htm soon) I believe that I was able
to reduce out-of band QRM a couple of dB. At least I can boost up signals
by another 15 dB when there is low noise on the band (DCF39 with
pre-amplifier: -9.4 dBu !).
Thanks, guys, for the nice weekend on the band! It really sounded like a
20m pileup (did you know that there is still a gap in the ionosphere at
14.012 kHz, burned into it by the pileup when the ZA1RPS dx-pedition first
called cq back in the sixties?).
Vy 73
Geri, DK8KW (W1KW)
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