Those of you who read this column regularly will know that I use 60m (5 meg) for many of my FT8 contacts. This band was introduced about 15 years ago as an experiment, allowing us limited use of vacant military frequencies.

This was based on the USA system called MARS, Military Auxiliary Radio System. This allowed amateurs to use US air force frequencies in support of their communications network in times of need.

November was the 70th anniversary of this, with 14 special event stations on the air. I managed to hear most of them but could only manage to work two, probably due to our power limit of 100W here in the UK. The image below shows the activation certificate.

Another, but most important anniversary was the 100th of the first direct contact between UK and New Zealand on the 18 October 1924. I managed to work both ends of this during the 90th however only the UK end this time with David Goyder, nephew of Cecil and a student at Mill Hill School. The QSL card has photos of both the operators and a map of the world highlighting the radio gear.

The beginning of December bought in my 221st DXCC for 2024, my best ever, beating 195 in 2014. However, I am still trying to get the all-time score over 300!

Using 15m in the late afternoons and 60m in the evenings, I have worked more USA stations than I care to count. I have a chart of the US grid squares that I use to mark contacts, and there are now very few that are still blank. I doubt I will ever work them all, which reminds me that I log every county that I can get information on. There are 3077 in all - a huge number - but with a score of just over 1,000 I’m well on my way. [Ever tried GridTracker Chris? - Berni]

On the 20th I was monitoring 15m FT8 when a German call popped up. It did not seem to be one of the regulars, so I persisted with a contact and worked Alex, DP0GVN at the Neumayer III research station on Antarctica. Last month I said Tierra del Fuego was probably as far south as you can work, well this beat that at 70.5 deg South with a balmy summer temperature of –2 deg C.

Something I have found working the US is that most of the stations worked have high towers dominating their property, rather than the blue wire in a tree that we use. When I worked my 1,000th county with KE8RFE, I looked up his locator, translated it to Google Earth and saw a lattice tower the best part of 80ft tall!

So, a quick summary of the year; I finally worked 224 DXCCs (an all-time best for me, that would have got me the DXCC with extra stickers) of which 146 were islands (which would have qualified for the basic IOTA award) including many new ones, mostly in the Pacific area. All this as the sun cycle has been near the maximum for this cycle.

I wonder what 2025 will bring?

Happy New Year and good DXing,

Chris, G4ZCS

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