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LA7SL sent me a mail with some good news yesterday. Finally new sunspots appearing. This is certainly great news for all radioamateurs. The higher bands has been quite dead way too long. Read the news below.

Space Weather News for Sept. 22, 2008
http://spaceweather.com

NEW SUNSPOT: For the first time in months, a significant sunspot is emerging on the sun. It is a fast-growing active region with two dark cores, each larger than Earth. The magnetic polarity of the sunspot identifies it as a member of new Sunspot Cycle 24. Because the year 2008 has brought so many blank suns, some observers have wondered if we are ever going to climb out of the ongoing deep solar minimum. Today’s new sunspot is an encouraging sign that the 11-year solar cycle is indeed progressing, albeit slowly. Visit http://spaceweather.com for sunspot photos and updates.

SEPTEMBER EQUINOX: Seasons on Earth change much faster than they do on the sun. Today, autumn begins in the northern hemisphere and spring in the southern hemisphere when the sun crosses the celestial equator. The crossing, called the "equinox," takes place at 1544 UT (11:44 EDT) on Monday, Sept. 22nd. Happy equinox!

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I was down in Rakkestad this weekend, visiting the LA8W station. It is also LA7SL’s home. We had to do some antennawork before the upcoming cqww contest. We managed to get most of the 40m 4-square and the brackets for the beverage antennas done. Now we need to get the antennas up and working.

We threw in a few hours in the SAC CW contest too. Nothing too serious, since antenna work was first priority.

All pictures courtesy of LB1GB!

I just read over at the ARRL DXCC Blog that the WAC (Worked All Continents) certificates are redesigned. One of the interesting things mentioned, are that LoTW will support the WAC award in a future upgrade. I have never applied for any certificates yet, even though I'm qualified for several different ones. Maybe in the future.

Original article here:

http://www.arrl.org/blog/DXCC%20Dialog

Pictures of the new certificates:
 

The new ones this time are GI0WLW, 5X1NH, Z32XX and 1A4A. Thank you very much. My total is closing in on 200 now with 190 confirmed.

It’s been pretty quiet on the radiofront with no contacts made in September. However I did do some dx’ing in August. KH6MB was worked on 30M for a new one there, and also 20M 40minutes later. TO8S (FG), YI9WV, TC4X, VE8RCS/VY0 (NA-008) and SD3D (EU-176)  was worked on 30M. 7P8BA was worked on 20M for a new one there and V51XG was worked on 17M.

Edit September 18th: Another good one was confirmed with ZK1DI, though I had the dxcc before with ZK1EQL. Keep them coming. I appreciate it much.

I updated to the newest WordPress version yesterday. If you run WordPress and haven’t done it yet, please do. The previous version has a security risc.

Get it here: http://wordpress.org/download/

List of changes: 

• 7002 Can’t control where a user redirects to when they log in
• 7529 Bug in textpattern import
• 7600 include mysql version in version check query string
• 7614 RSS widget shouldn’t link if there isn’t a link
• 7623 get_post_meta fails to unserialize when $single=false
• 7638 typing error in wp-settings.php
• 7699 comment_max_links causes confusion when zero
• 7326 get_posts not working properly
• 7495 Insert image into post always inserts full size
• 7547 Filter news on templates cant work
• 7551 Typo in post revisions
• 7710 admin account exploit