After the feast of DX in the first few months of the year, April has been relatively quiet.
Another bout of Chemo laid me low for a few days, then on recovery, all went wrong. The loop antenna feeder finally gave up the ghost and had to be renewed with the last of my stock of new 450 ohm.
Then, the computer threw its toys out of the pram! Now I’m no expert, but after nearly 20 years, why would my logging program suddenly decide to crash on boot-up? I tried everything in the book to get it working with no luck. I won’t go into all the details as I expect everyone has a different set up. I finally gave up & accepted that I had to ask for help.
I put a call out on a user group and received a barrage of good ideas (from New Zealand) most of which I had already tried. I gave an update on my lack of progress and then another ideas guy from France suggested a possible fix buried in Windoze. I went through this, step by painful step, and hey presto it works again. After a few more adjustments all is now OK. What surprised me was that as a result of our messages, many more sufferers came out of the shadows complaining of the same fault. Perhaps I was the only one to be brave (daft) enough to admit defeat. The fix has now been published in the help files for others to see.
Now back to radio - what radio? It seems we were hit by a massive coronal discharge that not only gave us pretty Aurora to look at but virtually killed all propagation.
While waiting for conditions to improve, I did an analysis of my log to see which of the “most wanted” I had worked using only my delta loop. Not surprisingly all the top ones are still on my wanted list, but once I get to No 14 (ZS8) then they appear thick & fast, 17 (PY0T), 18 (KP5), and 23 (EZ). Both 14 and 23 were a result of a chat on a quiet band not just a “59 next” in a pileup.
Now we are getting toward the middle of the year fresh pickings are becoming fewer, however those of us who have beams are able to pick off the ones I can only just hear in the noise. Now I really wish I had my tri-bander on the top of the tower rather than keeping dry in the garage! Unfortunately, I am now unable to do anything about it, as the XYL has banned me from ladders with more than 3 steps.
So to round off the month, conditions remain poor but another half dozen in the bag for the year and 8 new islands to add to the total.
73s till next month
Chris
