no9e

In July 2025 I went to Australia and New Zealand. Of course, Elecraft KX2 radio went with me. Since QRP is not much power and nearly all contacts for Australia are DX, QTH selection is important, at best over salt water in the direction of DX. In Darwin Australia (region Read more

For many years my family travels to St George Island for the end-of-year vacation. I always take a radio and at times try to make an effort to participate in the Stew Perry contest. This time it was too much drama – please read. http://no9e.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Perry_StGeorge_25.pdf

To my surprise I scored #1 USA in CQ 160 contest in the SO Assisted category. See an official article. The last time a station in GA scored as #1 was W8JI in 2008 with his tremendous station. The contest was influenced by a geomagnetic disturbance and the conditions were Read more

I figured out why my EME setup was not working. After fixing the antennas, by mistake I fed them out of phase. Instead of getting 1+1=2 I got 1-1=0. I still made one EME QSO when the antenna was off, because out of phase the antenna has peaks about 20 Read more

I like to operate as assisted to maximize QSO count.This does not always work well with spots from public clusters because 1) many spots have wrong calls, 2) some spots are outside of local propagation, and 3) attractive spots create pileups. I used CW Skimmer via SDR-IQ radio, lately with Read more

I did a few SSB contests using TenTec 715 external speech processor. With the processor, stations were giving me about 2S better report, an improvement of about 6 db or 4 times. My signal is finally competitive. In CQ 160 phone, I got a second place in the 4th region. Read more

I own Flex since Sept 2019. The goal was to have SO2R capability onsite, and possibility of a remote operation. First years were painful. Remote connection was iffy; sometimes I could not connect in half an hour. Crashes. New firmware that caused more crashes. Disappearing memories during contesting. Lousy transmit Read more

My EME setup on 2m is 2 x M2 9 el Yagis, Dow Microwave preamp, FT991 and a 1 KW Beko amp. Until a couple of months ago I was able to make many EME contacts. Sometimes I would not hear stations (ZL and CT8) when my preamp was fried Read more

I needed a multiplier beam for the Southeast for working Caribbean multipliers. At best far away from my main tower. However the best spot was full of trees shedding branches, and a regular tower would be risky. I remembered constructing a 3 el 20m Spiderbeam using a carbon glass fishing Read more