David, M0TDN @M0TDN@mastodon.radio

After months sat up on the roof doing nothing, I finally hooked up my HF discone to where I need it and ran some FT8 monitoring tests overnight. Considering propagation is supposed to be garbage, I was very surpirsed how well it performed. Never seen so many contacts over the pond with my previous efforts, just a shame I cannot tx with it too. Receiver was Airspy R2 with Spyverter.

Test mounted my new HF discone in the loft. Good signals down to the 60khz time signal, VHF/UHF ham bands were dead which is probably about right. Hopefully get this up outside soon but will need a much more robust aerial mast first.

After Sunday's miserable performance on the club net. I hacked together a basic dipole using some thick galvanised wire I had lying around. Not very easy to work with so tuning would be challenging. No need to worry, first test gave a 1:1 match on the upper half of the 2m band! Put out a call on GB3MI which is in the area of my club members, no response but I could RX myself via hackgreen websdr and gave myself 59, FB!