Ham Radio Operator - M0YKS

After finishing off a week at work I started my weekend by firing up my ham radio station where I heard K6YRA coming in loud on 14.193 Mhz. K6YRA - Al was on the west coast of N. America in California and I was hearing him with a signal strength of 7-9db and Q5 audio. As I waited for my amplifier to warm up its ceramic valves I set my antenna position to 310 degrees and listened in. After a few contacts by Al across Europe I gave one call and got straight through to K6YRA - Al who gave me a 5/9 signal report from California. Not a bad catch and a great DX qso once again in the log. Have a good weekend and watch out for some interesting openings. 73 Simon M0YKS

I managed to get a bit more done on my latest project which is the antenna mast which I will use for my Cushcraft HF beam. It's still work in progress but going well so far and easy enough as well as great fun to build. Im making it up as I go along, let's wait and see how it all pans out. Best 73 see you soon. 

I've been planning on building myself a small neat lattice tower and today I made a start. So far I have produced some guides that will hold the tubes in place as well as providing some strength to the tower. The next stage is to build it up using tube and then fully weld each joint.

Another good evening of DX on the 20 meter band as I work into North, South and central America. Once again the radio propagation is providing great conditions with some excellent signals coming in to my Ham radio station here at Baildon Moor. If you haven't already been on your radio this week I would recommend tuning around the 20m band between 1900 - 0000 utc. I have been making lots of good qso and so have lots of other radio amateurs as we all enjoy the long awaited reliable openings across the Atlantic every night this week. Dont miss out, get on the band! Best 73 and do you like my new CW key made by Bencher?

It sure is great to be able to tell you that the past month or so has shown significant improvement regarding radio propagation and DX. I am still mainly active operating towards the end of the day and into the night after work and family are taken care of and for a long time the bands have not  been open for DX. Lately it has been a different story as the 20m band has finally come alive and  woken up for the night shift allowing regular state side QSO and also some big DX signals from Argentina, Chile, Peru and Japan. I also got a nice one on the short skip earlier as I managed a couple of hops again on 20m over to the Isle of Man when GD1JNB came in booming through like a local. The short skip wasn't around for long but was pretty cool whilst it lasted, as for the DX you catch me in QSO with LU9MBY from Argentina as I bust the pile up!

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