St Jude's Day Storm

A strong storm over the south of the country overnight and early this morning, which has been given the name of the St Jude's Day Storm.

No serious damage, however I lost my Off Centre dipole wire antenna after a branch from one of the trees in the garden came day.

On checking the garden I found this:

Repairs will have to wait until the weekend.

The strongest gust of wind that my weather system recorded was 37mph which is very low considering gusts of 70 to 80mph were recorded across the south of the country.

The wind speed is measured slightly above the ridge of the roof as shown in the following picture:

However, to the south (left of the above picture) we have a small wood with lots of tall trees. These have a shielding effect so we do not often get the full force of the wind so I always register lower wind speeds

The following picture is a screen copy from my weather system which shows the change in pressure as the storm passed through (top graph):

The lower graph shows the rainfall (red line) which reset at midnight, showing the large amount of rain yesterday evening and this morning. The green line in the lower graph shows temperature. Interesting to note the fall in temperature coincides with the increase in air pressure in the top graph.

JT65 Activity This Evening

I managed to spend some time on the radio this evening for some JT65-HF activity on 20m. Put out some CQ calls and worked the following stations:

DL7UM, KS3K, NW9T and 9Y4NW

9Y4NW in Trinidad and Tobago is I think a new one for me so many thanks for the call Neil.

I was called by KY7S in Seattle but unfortunately after the first call I could not decode anything more, so could not exchange signal reports.

Magnetometer Installed

Dodging the rain over the weekend I installed the Magnetometer in the garden.

The box with the sensor is buried below ground. The reason for this is to minimise the impact of temperature changes. I have found the sensor to be very sensitive to changes. In the garden also tries to distance the sensor from any moving metallic objects which may impact the readings.

The following shows the sensor box in position:

The compass on the box is to ensure there is correct alignment of the sensor along the east - west axis.

The box about to disappear (I did remove the compass before filling in!)

The control box with the processing electronics is mounted on a fence post in a water tight box.

This is connected to a PicoTech Enviromon system in the shed that monitors the output voltage and records the data. Software on the computer produces an updated graph every few minutes.

I will post some sample graphs to show the results. Hopefully this will work.

No Wonder I Was Getting A Poor SWR !!

A week ago I tried to tune my FT2000 on 40m via the external SGC Smart Tuner but it would not tune up and the meter on the FT2000 was showing an infinite SWR, not good!.

This weekend I was able to get outside on Sunday despite really bad weather and this is what I found:

No wonder it would not tune up.

The cable usually breaks where it passes through the insulator at the 90 degree bend in the inverted L. As shown in an earlier post, it is this insulator which has been up for so long that the majority of the insulator has been engulfed in the branch. It was originally loose, held by some rope around the branch, this was 14 years ago when I first received the M5LMY licence which meant I could get on the HF bands.

Over those 14 years, the branch has gradually grown around the rope, then the insulator so that now more than 50% is buried within the branch. In another 5 to 8 years I guess it will disappear altogether.

The cable breaks at this point as there is no flexibility with the insulator so the cable is rubbing on the fixed insulator and wears through.

The weather yesterday has really bad. Raining for much of the day with some intense bursts along with thunder and lightning. The following is from my weather station, the red line showing rainfall:

In total today we had 22.4mm of rain.

Conditions seem to be improving on 10m recently. The following is a snapshot of the map from wsprnet.org yesterday evening showing where my signal had been heard.



This is running 5w to a very small random length of wire, hidden within some conifer trees, fed via an auto tuner.

Not much activity recently, mainly due to work. One JT65 contact with K8QZ on Friday evening.

A Day of Activity

It was grey and overcast here in the south of the UK yesterday so a good day to play radio.

It was Railways on the Air weekend so there were a number of special event stations to work. I managed to get 13 stations in the logbook.

I spent some time during the evening working JT65 on 20M.

The above is a snapshot of my screen showing an hour's activity during the evening. For this mode, I use my Kenwood TS2000 running into an M0CVO HW-40HP antenna. This system works really well on all bands from 40m through to 10m with the internal ATU on the TS2000.

JT65 is my preferred data mode at the moment. It supports long distance working with low power I get called by the type of DX that I could never work using SSB.

MV5LMY QSL Cards

I used the "V" prefix earlier this year which was issued to mark the centenary of the RSGB. My call sign was MV5LMY. The RSGB also designed a couple of special QSL designs, I ordered one of these and have now received my pack of cards ready to complete details and send:

This is the "Art Deco" design. I selected this design as it is very similar to my first QSL card when I was G8LMY back in 1977. This original card also had a red map of the country to the right of the card.

Now just need to write them all and send via the bureau.