Preparations, they are a foot in A71 land

Well,

Been back to QARS today, my first visit was here:

http://g0mgx.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/a7-land-a71a-ah-qatar.html

The guys are busy preparing for this weekends WPX SSB contest, they are most welcoming (I'm the fat one in the middle):

They will be running from the QARS HQ in the contest this weekend, but the guys also have this modest station in the desert for contest operation:

Stunning, egh?

RTTYing in A71 Land

Well,

Its been snowing hard in the UK (so I understand), but I'm stuck in A71 land this weekend....

The Qatar Amateur Radio Society were doing a stall at an exhibition recently, I called by to see them, here's the set up:

I've actually spent some time at the QARS main site today, you may remember I visited them a while ago:

http://g0mgx.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/a7-land-a71a-ah-qatar.html

I've been running RTTY using one of their FT-2000s. You may recall I made an interface for my FT-450 a while back:

http://g0mgx.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/hows-interfacing.html

Well, here it is on top of the FT-2000 - plus an adapter for the rig end of the cables:

So been running on 20M RTTY today with the callsign A71A. Been quite hard work as at times there were many stations calling, but no single signal decoding, I guess I perhaps need to consider working split next time.

Fun though, egh?

Grey What? Ah, Grey Line!

Well,

Still spending most of my time in A7 land, not yet with license for the region but am still hopeful. Travelling back tomorrow, so will be checking progress during the week.

Propagation in general is a topic that I claim to know very little about and understand even less about, however, I do very much understand the theory and concept of grey-line propagation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_(solar)

From time to time, you see or hear something that arguably cant be anything other than the effects of grey-line propagation. Here's an example from 30M the other evening...

This happened, of course, just as the UK was entering night and Australia was entering day.... the grey line on the earth was connecting the two areas of the globe. You can see that through more normal propagation methods, my signals were reaching into Europe and not much further.

Interesting, hugh?