The Short Wave Magazine June 1976 [antikvár]

Volume XXXIV THE SHORT WAVE MAGAZINE 213 COMMUNICATION and DX NEWS --- E. P. Essery, G3KFE WELL, we hear the correspondants muttering, what the blank-blank happened to my offering last time? Simply, a combination of the change in style upsetting your scribe's idea of his space allowance on the one hand, plus loads of news at the last minute. We ended up with enough overage for a complete extra piece! That which remains current, and can be got in this time, is included here—always provided we aren't bombarded with more late news to excess ! Turning to the matter of conditions, one has to admit that the question of when the new sunspot cycle will have got under way to a sufficiënt degree actually to be noted by those-who-know is becoming somewhat of an obsession—informed opinion of these matters in effect says it knows of no single sign which will say the turn has been reached, and all of us are guessing; and that means old G9BF (who claims the new cycles always start with a touch of gout in his left big toe) might as well be watched as the other arbiters ! However, for those who subscribe to Geoff Watts* DX News Sheet, West Coast DX Bulletin, or other weekly epistles of this nature that carry the forecasts of W4UMF right from the banks of the Potomac will know just how uncannily right he is. Part of the excised copy mentioned that Ted predicted a whole week of good conditions, which duly happened ; and this month he offers May 13-19 as having been worth watching. Ten Metres The Ten-Metre Activity Day, reports SWL Whitaker (Harrogate), was a much greater success than previously; some 400 G's are known to have been active at some time or other during the period. Ground-wave contacts up to 40 miles seemed to be the normal thing, but some G's were working quite good GDX for example, G3HCU (Guildford) getting up into Yorkshire, and a Leeds SWL hearing a station in Sussex. There was also the odd DX opening during the morning and early afternoon, with ZE, ZS, 9J2 being worked, while later in the afternoon a couple of PY's got through, plus VP9HZ/MM, ZD8TM and 5T5ZR. The idea of serial numbers—even though this was in no wise a contest—certainly gave a tang to the game, as it was noted G30ZF made no less than 103 QSO's, while G3HCU made 67, of which 22 were over the 70-mile mark. Overseas logs came in from 9H1CH, DA2WN, JA9BOH, W1MMV; that from the JA was of special interest, containing as it did so much which to us in the U.K. comes into the category of rare and exotic DX! AU in all, it was a highly successful event and it certainly showed how much we are losing by not putting our local nets on the band; there is one regularly on from Devon on Sunday mornings (28-550 at 1100), and in Bristol there is a CW one (28011, 1900z) and an SSB group on Sunday mornings at 1000z on 28-550 MHz; the CW gang reconvene on Sundays also, at 0930z —then of course there is the Gi one already mentioned in past months. So . . . how about some more? Maybe it would be no bad thing for calling to be concentrated on one frequency for each mode— say, 28025 kHz CW, 28-5 MHz SSB, with the QSY to follow once contact has been made. No matter what period of the sunspot cycle we happen to be in, Ten will always be showing with openings a la VHF, which makes it a good band for filling in some of those EU préfixés which would otherwise be classed as QRM— and even at this point in the cycle the alert may still note the odd DX signais, as did G3NÖF (Yeovil) who heard the odd weak Italian and even a "thin" ZS, as well as getting the buzz from elsewhere that the band opened to North America during the March 26 Aurora. Interesting, this last—it seems a bit more than coincidence that Ten opens East-West frequently when Aurora events are happening, and it makes one wonder.