kevw - 2W0KAW

All my radio equipment has been packed away for nearly 12 months, I simply haven’t had any spare time so I’d boxed everything up and even took the antennas and mast down.

I’ve been itching to have a play on PSK for a while so I set up the Icom 706 on Saturday and put the 40m Delta Loop back up, it didn’t take long and I had the radio back on.  It wasn’t until last night that I got the 706 connected to a computer for PSK,  I’m using DM780 (part of Ham Radio Deluxe) and have configured it to report to pskreporter.info for reception stats.  The radio is running as I type and you can see the reports here.

I was quite surprised at how quiet the HF bands are, my father reported the same from his location.  I’m not in a great spot for radio but I haven’t heard it so quiet for years!

Looking back at the PSKreporter stats from early this morning there does seem to be some good propagation going on, I might need to get up early one day and make some contacts (this is not going to happen!).