JT9 DX on 40 metres mid morning

The HF bands are up and down, communication if you believe the propagation forecasts are not very good (early February 2017). A case in point was today with inter UK working being not very good. Close continental Europe of course is fine. I worked a station in Luxembourg, Netherlands and Switzerland.
Then on JT9 I saw Paul KA1MDQ over in Mashpee, MA, USA on the screen calling CQ. I went straight back to him and we exchanged RST signal reports of -22db and -25db respectively. As people know my antenna isn't complicated (just a long wire with 5 watts fed from a remote ATU into a 9:1 UNUN). This was a distance of 3152 miles - not bad for 40 metres during the day. I was encouraged that the bands are still open during the mid morning which is my normal time of working.

Propagation forecast 7th February 2017
K of 1 is good and it does say conditions on 80-40m is fair during the day.

I had a look around 40m over the previous weekend on JT9 and JT65 at about 1AM and found that it was crowded with stations from all over the world. It's a pity I like my bed more than I like radio so did not work anybody.

News from Ham Radio Deluxe and JTAlert

It seems that controversial co owner of Ham Radio Deluxe LLC Rick Ruhl W4PC has now retired from HRD LLC his last day was 30/12/2016. I wish the company all the best in their future endeavours.
A few days earlier the author of the fantastic JTAlert program Laurie VK3AMA has stated that version 2.9 will no longer support Ham Radio Deluxe integration. This is a shame but entirely understandable given the way he was treated.
To all JTAlert / HRD V6 users. 

I will no longer be providing support for HRD V6 logging within JTAlert.
This comes into effect with the next public release of JTAlert (2.9.0).

Affected HRD users can continue to use the current version of JTAlert (2.8.7) for as long as they want.
I will not be able to provide any support for that version, however, if a future HRD release breaks the JTAlert/HRD integration.

The free V5 of HRD will continue to be supported.

Moving forward, all future JTAlert versions will not support HRD V6 logging.

I will not be participating in any public or private discussions regarding the reasons for this decision".

I sincerely apologise to the affected HRD users.

de Laurie VK3AMA

And later he gave a brief expanation of his decision

Laurie, VK3AMA

After some "soul-searching", I now feel I owe the community an explanation, even if brief, regarding my decision to abandon HRD V6 logging support in JTAlert, especially to those users directly affected by this decision.

"Bottom-Line", I don't want myself or my software to have any sort of association with HRDLLC the company, their policies or their products.

This decision was a long time coming. The draft for the announcement had been sitting in my email draft folder for over 12 months. I came close to making the announcement on two other occasions in that time, but chose to "back-off", primarily because I knew this would affect a large number of JTAlert users and I felt uncomfortable with that.

The "die was cast" when HRDLLC released HRD ver 6.3.0.435 in October 2015. That release contained malicious code that deliberately shutdown JTAlert on a users PC without warning or message to the user that HRD had performed this unauthorised act. Details of this are publicly available within this groups message archives.

There have been several other events and interactions with HRDLLC over that time that are not publicly known, contributing to this decision, and I will not be discussing them here or privately.

While the association with HRDLLC was simply that my software had a feature that extended the functionality of HRD in providing a JT65/JT9 logging bridge, I am no longer comfortable supporting (by association) HRDLLC the Company, their policies or their products.

Again, I sincerely apologise to the affected HRD users.


de Laurie VK3AMA

I currently am running the following to control the rig for JT modes:

• Version 6.3.0.612 of Ham Radio Deluxe
• Version 2.8.7 of JTAlertX
• Version 1.7.0 r7405 of WSJT-X

It looks like this may be my setup for the foreseeable future until something else comes about - I might have a look at DXLab again for instance. I do wish with the change in management of HRDLLC that they can make amends with Laurie but I do entirely understand and support Laurie's decision.

I've just found TXFactor

No not the Simon Cowell revenue generating TV programme of a similar name but a TV channel on YouTube dedicated to Amateur Radio.

It is very well produced if a little long (the episode I watched was 64 minutes) but if you have a remote interest in Amateur Radio you may find this interesting.

http://www.txfilms.co.uk/txfactor/

I certainly found Episode 13 interesting with articles about Radio Caroline and general radio propagation. Jim Bacon G3YLA is a superb communicator and demystifies propagation, Sporadic E, radio predictions on the video. RadCom had a tiny mention of TXFactor in January 2017 edition thanks go to the RSGB. There are 13 episodes so far and I hope there are many more.
https://youtu.be/vfaNtwsEk1A

It is sponsored by Martin Lynch (MLS) and there are a small amount of advertisements to watch. Well done to the people behind TXFactor.

New gardeners

We have a new team and they are fantastic. They know what they are doing and I mentioned about the grounding cable. They will take care around it.
Result.

Gardening contractor experience

I used to have a terrific gardener who came in once a week and did some garden maintenance with his crew. Unfortunately he became ill earlier this year and can't currently work. In his place he sent around a pair of idiots (not his usual crew) who took on his "round" and said they were giving him a portion of the payment.
I took them on thinking that Danny would come back later in the season (2016) but unfortunately he is still not well. In the meantime I have been watching the idiots whose idea of garden maintenance is mowing lawns and strimming (UK Strimmer is USA Line Trimmer, String Trimmer or Weed Eater) perfectly good plants out of existence while leaving weeds intact.
They use a leaf blower to blow leaves about a bit resulting in them being trapped behind planters, in flower beds and under our cars. This is also known as "sweeping dust under the rug".

They are completely hopeless and I am actively looking for new contractors - don't make any suggestions BTW as I'm in England. The last straw came when I found they had strimmed all our perennial sweet peas off the face of the earth. These have come up every year since we bought the house (16 years ago) and are beautiful in the springtime. Worst of all they strimmed my grounding cable connection the HF antenna to its copper grounding stake - as well as woodworking I am a ham radio operator and this cable is important.



I'm keeping them on for the fall leaves, banned their strimmer and once all the leaves are all down they are sacked.

THEY HAVE GOT TO GO!

15m is up in the UK at the moment

I know we have been approaching the doldrums on HF but over the last couple of days 15 metres has been open and I've heard lots of DX. South Africa is coming in strong and South America is good too. At the time of writing 11:45 UTC 9th August 2016 it has become lively.

There is hope for DX yet so get your ears on and listen or if operating digimodes get the computer on!

HF Doldrums

Very little HF working in the last few days. Daytime working has been limited to occasional contacts on 20 metres. Early morning I've had a few 40 metre contacts. SFI is currently 73 with a K index of 4.
This is what approaching a solar minimum is like :(