Upper HF bands...

[G6Tanuki]

Just wondering, have any of you been enjoying using vintage gear during the recent rather good conditions on 21 and 28MHz??

There has been good propagation transatlantic on 15M most days for the last fortnight and 10M has been intermittently good in late afternoon early evening.

25 Watts PEP from my little Clansman PRC320 to a couple of low dipoles happily works into New York State, Florida and plenty of Caribbean islands when fed to a bit of wire


Apparently there is an AM net on 15M but I have yet to find it.

What have you been working recently with your vintage HF radios

[G3VKM_Roger]

I think that there is AM operation with vintage gear around 29010kc, I haven't operated there myself for many years but working the US with an LG-50 was easy in the past.

73

Roger

[Jon_G4MDC]

The Hertfordshire AM net was on 28.8888MHz which I think was because there were plenty of surplus crystals available for that frequency. I got my ticket just too late. I built a TX with a QQV0-3-20 in the PA and I never worked anyone.

My project for a 10m FM10D Pye Cambridge is also stalled. The PIC and Si5351 are talking with one another. It all needs connecting to the rig. By the time I finish it this cycle will probably be over!

[G6Tanuki]

I will be leaving a receiver (probably my AR88) idling around 29010 to see if it hears anything.

And am planning to use the day to put up a wire dipole for 15M, as the 17 foot vertical I use as a base fed quarter / half wave for 20 and 10M has matching issues on 15M.

I feel that 15M is kinda like the sweet spot for upper HF operation at the moment. More reliable than 10M but not as congested as 20M, particularly at weekends when there always seems to be a contest taking place.

Now where's my bag of N connectors?!

[electronicskip]

Not been on 28 but 27Mhz (CB) has been a bit more lively . Heard stuff from the states with my Thunderpole 5/8wave with old rigs etc.

[David G4EBT]

A third of the way through Sunspot Cycle 25, which began in December 2019.

Several predictions have been made for solar cycle 25, based on different methods, ranging from very weak to strong magnitude. A physics-based prediction relying on the data-driven solar dynamo and solar surface flux transport models by Bhowmik and Nandy (2018) seems to have predicted the strength of the solar polar field at the current minima correctly and forecasts a weak but not insignificant solar cycle 25 similar to or slightly stronger than cycle 24.

Sunspot numbers over the past 11,400 years have been reconstructed using carbon-14 isotope ratios. The level of solar activity beginning in the 1940s is exceptional – the last period of similar magnitude occurred around 9,000 years ago (during the warm Boreal period). The Sun was at a similarly high level of magnetic activity for only ~10% of the past 11,400 years. Almost all earlier high-activity periods were shorter than the present episode.

Worth looking back at the graphs over time:

Source wiki:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle

When I was working, (yet seemed to have more time on my hands to do sedentary unproductive things like going on air), back in 1982 during Sunspot Cycle 21, I spent some time on 15 & 20 metres, mostly using homebrew trapped dipoles and a homebrew copy of a 'G4MH' mini-beam. I was using a Yaesu 'FT201' 100-Watt transceiver, which seemed not to sell very well, yet but performed well and was nice to use.

Without much effort, I had lots of DX contacts and gained the 'Worked All Continents Award' based on a couple of weekend's worth of contacts, though the term 'Worked' to describe sitting at a desk operating a push-button mike always seemed to me to be an 'oxymoron'.

Nevertheless, it was enjoyable and seemed like fun at the time.

No pile-ups - just put out a CQ call and see who came back.

It always seemed slightly odd that you could hear stations in ZL, Japan, Oz etc, but couldn't hear G stations as the ground wave was weak, but the sky wave was reflected well by the ionosphere, and low-angle radiation meant the skip distance was long.

After a while, it dawned on me that anyone else sat in the same chair, at the same time, using the same equipment, would attain the same results, which rather took the shine off things. Evocative of childhood memories of trainspotting, and cigarette card collecting.

I'm well out of touch now - I don't know if people still exchange QSL cards as avidly as they did back then. I've attached a few, and looking back, it's intriguing to note that after much turmoil, some of the countries on the attached few QSL cards no longer exist in their same entities:

Czechoslovakia, ceased to exist as such after the non-violent 'Velvet Revolution' from 17 - 28 November 1989. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9 November 1989, leading to the reunification of Germany, the so called 'German Democratic Republic' went. The collapse of the USSR occurred from 1989 - 92. The break-up of Yugoslavia into its constituent states arose from 25 Jun 1991 – 28 Apr 1992. (Yugoslavia had only come into being after the 1918 collapse of Austria-Hungary at the end of World War I).

Thought for the day:

'When my kids joke about me struggling to understand my smartphone,
I remind them that I'm the guy who taught them how to use a spoon'.

[G6Tanuki]

Fascinating reminiscences there David of your previous operations on the upper HF bands.

These days we don't bother with postal QSL cards, using instead eQSL or logging our contacts on QRZ.COM - not sure if the older style postcard QSL bureaux still operate [I doubt so] and the demize of the IRC [International Reply Coupon] a few decades back no doubt pushed the paper bureaux into oblivion.

In times past I was a subscriber to the Geoff Watts DX News Sheet service too. Who remembers that?

My recent playing-around on 28MHz has been with a version of the Boyer/Northrop DDRR Hula-Hoop; when I bought this house a decade and a bit back it had a nasty immersion-heater and hot-water-tank in the attic - having had such a thing freeze up in a previous house it had to go - and the old 100 gallon copper cylinder sat in the orchard until recently - when I sliced-and-diced it to produce a rather nice flat ground-plane for my DDRR; using 15mm copper pipe as the hoop and a big ex-US-military wide-spaced variable capacitor to tune it, it's high-Q and seems to work well - lots of US stations [Texas, New Mexico], Caribbeans, and South Americans [PY] - but there again in the late-60s during the solar maximum we were hearing US 27MHz CB stations using only a couple of Watts mobile or hand-held.

HF is fun!

[dodgy-dxer]

So who do you define by "we"?

YOU may not send QSL cards many peope still do

The worldwide QSL bureaus still work, I get a few hundred cards a year and I'm not that active

IRCs have gone away but US$ and PayPal have replaced them

The main supplement to QSL cards is the ARRL Logbook of the World (LOTW) where QSO matches can be applied to ARRL and other awards

Fred G4BWP

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

These days we don't bother with postal QSL cards, using instead eQSL or logging our contacts on QRZ.COM - not sure if the older style postcard QSL bureaux still operate [I doubt so] and the demise of the IRC [International Reply Coupon] a few decades back no doubt pushed the paper bureaux into oblivion.