LA8AJA's homepage

I'm not that much into the IOTA program, but I do work IOTA's from time to time. I have managed to work a few over 300, but since there are over 1000 IOTA's, I have a long way to go. Since we had an IOTA Contest coming up, I noticed plenty of activities. I worked a few new ones before the contest and they were RN1N/P EU-147, OH1K EU-140, IG9/IK2PZC AF-019, KL7RRC/P NA-235 and LZ1BJ/1 EU-181.

In the contest I worked around 30 contacts, and the new IOTA's were CS2K EU-167, 4O1OTA EU-163, W3DX NA-067 and UW2F/P EU-179. That makes my IOTA total come up to 314.

On July 24th, I managed to work 9X0TL for #267 on 30M.

On July 25th, I noticed JW/OZ1IKY was spotted on 6M. An OZ group was operating from JW5E in JQ78. I have never managed to work this square. After listening for a few hours, he came up strong enough for me to work him. That was square #646 worked on 6M.

Last week I noticed YI9PSE had uploaded the log on LoTW. That gave me YI confirmed on 3 bands and #258 LoTW only. Thank you very much for the expedition.

It has been pretty quiet on 6M, but did work a few contacts July 22nd. The band was open to G/GU/PA/F and I worked OH0/OH3XR and OH0/DK1MAX on CW. They were both worked on backscatter. G0VJG/P was worked in IN69. I have the grid, but it is pretty rare. On HF I worked VP5/W5CW on 17M.

July 23rd gave me V31BD on 30M CW. He uses LoTW, and will be a new one there. He had a solid signal this morning.

I've been using Google Earth quite a lot lately. I liked the pathplots I wrote about earlier, which I also have used in several posts. I made a small how-to on that here. I wrote a post back in 2008 about Google Earth and Hamradio which you can see here. If you haven't heard about Google Earth, it's a free program from Google. Read more and download here.

The reason I'm writing "part 2", is that 9A5CW Patrik pasted a link to a screenshot where he had lots of nice stuff drawn up. I asked him how, and he gave me a link. His screenshot is attached here. The link he gave me, was to live muf by G7RAU. This is very useful for you so you can follow how the muf climbs and maybe predict an ES-opening on VHF. I also use it to quickly show the 6m openings in progress right now. I find it more useful to see the spots drawn up than looking at lots of spots. You need to create a login to get access to some parts of the site. To only see VHF spots and the live muf, there are a few links that doesn't require login. Click to check out G7RAU's site.

Another nice thing was to also show the realtime aurora oval based on data from NOAA. To get that in Google Earth, go here and choose the "automatically updating Aurora viewing map".

If you want to see where the 6M beacons are placed, take a look at OE1SMC's site and grab the kml-file to display in Google Earth.

And finally, the last overlay presented here is the TEC (Total Electron Count) map. The map is useful for studying the radio propagation. Grab the overlay here.

Here are some examples of how my Google Earth looks like with different overlays:

On Saturday, I got an e-mail from JI2EVL, my first JA-contact on 6M. Turns out he too made a recording of our qso on July 19th 2009. It was his first LA on 6M. Listen to the recordings below. Thank you Hiro!

Soundclip:

• LA8AJA 6M CW – how I sound like at JI2EVL's station
• JI2EVL 6M CW – how Hiro was like at my station

JI2EVL's homepage.

July 17th we has some openings on 6M again. I managed to work 2 new grids with KN65 and KN74. That makes total grids worked 645. I heard A92IO, but I have worked him before. I called cq dx, and was called by A92GE.

July 18th I would probably have had an opening to JA on 6M, but I was on too late. I noticed LA5UF did work into JA. The only station I heard, was JA9SJI, who I worked last year.

July 21st showed nothing on 6M, so I went to HF. KH7XS was worked on 15M for our fifth band. XU7ACY was worked on 15M CW with a nice signal. KQ7W was staying up late on 17M CW and had a nice signal into Norway this morning. I worked him easily.