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At least at my QTH and during the few hours I’ve been on air, have noticed a poor condition on mostly ham radio bands.
I’ve been able to make some interesting contacts with just the dipole, beaming N/S.
LA6KOA, ED8OTA/M, 9N7JO, A41NN, 5R8UO, ZR1ADI and 7X4AN mostly on 20 and 15 meters band.

Last weekend I took part to the Ari international ham radio contest. Unofrtunately time to dedicate to the contest has been very low, just a couple of hours, but I’ve dedicated all my “spare time” to the competition.
Has been fun to be aknowledged so easily by so many stations, even being a qrp station. This has been my first experience with an amateur radio contest, and final impression has been positive.
I’m trying now to organize the electronic logbook (i’m going to use UA1AAF – Ari contest software) to send to the Ari HQ. My score has been very low, but as I’ve taken part to the contest just to enjoy myself withour any other goal.

This is an interesting quagi antenna plan.

Total Boom Lenght is 3 m.

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This was my ham radio portable setup station last week. Two interesting contacts with 5H3AA and 4J5A. Vertical antenna in the center is a prototype of the fishing rod antenna I’m testing in this period, even I’ve already understood that best results are on 40 meters band, but is still too early for a final report.
I’ve just ordered a fiber glass fishing rod, a really hard to find product in the carbon fiber era.

Newsgroups: rec.radio.shortwave
Subject: Grounding is key to good reception, was: Experience w/NRD-535

In your recent post you advised that coax should be grounded at two sites, first at the antenna and then just before entering the house. Is there an advantage in grounding at more than these sites?

With grounds the most common experience is “the more the merrier”. As you add more, however, you usually reach a diminishing returns (no pun intended) situation where there is no *observable* improvement: that’s usually a good place to stop. There are also exceptional circumstances where grounding increases noise problems, but these, in my experience, are much rarer than the pundits who preach against “ground loops” seem to think.

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The plan for PSK31 activity has always been (since PSK31 started) to concentrate activity starting from the bottom edge of the IARU RTTY bandplan, expanding upwards as activity increased. The exception is in the 10mts band in order to give non full privileges ham to meet. It was defined as 150 Hz above it. Keep in mind that all you need is about 100 Hz as channel separation.
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