Ham Radio Operator - M0YKS

I often enjoy listening to other Hams working some DX stations on 3.795 MHz just before bedtime and also in the morning at first light.  I've been doing this for years and have worked a few nice DX myself occasionally when I've picked up the microphone. This evening I heard a cracking signal coming in from across the Atlantic which belonged to W2RE. He was a real 5/9 + at my end to my FT-1000 and I received the same report back as I made the contact with 400 watts out of my G17B amplifier into the 6btv Hustler antenna. Now that is what I call a good way to end the day! Best 73 I'm off to bed.

It's been a busy start for me so far this year with little time to blog. I hope you are all enjoying life to the full and getting on. As for Ham Radio it's been a bit slow with not so many opportunities to make DX or any kind of decent qso. My evening operating has been mainly swl style on 40m and 80m as the higher end of HF has more often than not closed down at sunset. About six months back I put up a balanced doublet for 80m but now I have come to the end of the experiments and have concluded that the configuration is not best suited to my setup. The dipole was very noisy compared to my vertical Hustler 6btv and at times was unusable due to extreme noise levels on 80m. Earlier I remade the configuration of the dipole into an OCF dipole which basically means one leg is 81 feet long and the other leg is 50 feet. The total length is 131 feet and it's fed with 50 ohm coax into a 4:1 balun at 25 feet above the ground. I have used 3 support points with nylon insulators allow...