I’ve been making a ton of QSOs with my Yaesu FT-991A from my home station, mostly on FT8. I have an end fed half wave antenna and use an antenna tuner to get as good a match as possible. I’ve had an LDG AT-200Pro external automatic antenna tuner (LDG now sells the AT-200ProII) for years. […]
The last few months had been rather quiet, QSL Card-wise. Things started to pick up as of late. I worked HP1AVS in Panama on 17M using FT8. A flag and a map on a QSL card is always a plus with me. Two of my favorite things. The Mexican Club Radioaficionados Hidrocalidos (XE2CRH) celebrated their […]
CQ Magazine’s WPX Award is a popular and expansive award system. As many options as there are for award, and there are a lot, one might want to slice their award matrix up even further. The Activity Group of Belarus (AGB) has their own version of the WPX award in the form of the Prefixes […]
The Pacific Ocean is really large. In an effort to promote Amateur Radio activity in “Oceania” the New Zealand Association of Radio Transmitters (NZART) created the Worked All Pacific Award (WAP). One can find information for this award, and other NZART awards, on a PDF form available online. In a nutshell, refer to the ARRL […]
The Hawaiian Islands, like Alaska, remains a part of, but apart from, the majority of the United States. In Sweepstakes Hawaii is considered a domestic entity. In the ARRL DX Contest it’s considered a DX entity. The islands certainly maintain an allure that draws many tourists to their shores to this day. The Worked Hawaiian […]
I love maps. The FT8 Digital Modes Club‘s NZTD Award is issued for Amateur Radio operators who make contact with 6 or more New Zealand territories and dependencies. The award includes a nice map showing New Zealand and the surrounding dependencies whose contacts can be used for award credits. So that earns some extra points […]
The Activity Group of Belarus (AGB) offers a large number of Amateur Radio operating awards. One of these is the Zone 15 award, obtained by working stations in CQ Zone 15. This zone covers much of Eastern and Southern Europe. In fact, the AGB Zone 15 award certificate even shows a cutout of the map […]
Like many awards of the FT8 Digital Mode Club (FT8DMC), applying for their Europe Stations Award is easy. The harder part is trying to get to the “end” of the program, particularly if you live far away from Europe. To achieve the lowest level of the award an Amateur need make FT8 contacts with 100 […]
May was another good month for me, QSL wise. Working Pacific islands is much easier from California than it was from Texas. This card confirms contacts with E51BQ on Rarotonga (South Cook Islands) using FT8 on 30M and 17M. Indonesia isn’t that rare, but for whatever reason I had never acquired many YB QSL cards. […]
One of Amateur Radio’s most popular awards is CQ Magazine’s WPX Award. An Amateur can earn WPX by confirming contacts with a certain number stations with unique callsign prefixes. There are thousands of possible prefixes around the globe so it’s one of the more open ended programs out there. In the past collecting hundreds, if […]