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Thursday, March 19, 2015
Working VK6 Homebrew During the Big Solar Flare
There I was. 0900 UTC (0 Dark Thirty local), the morning after the big March 17 St. Patrick's Day Coronal Mass Ejection Impact. Solar Flux Index: 116. A Index: 117! I'd never seen the A Index that high. When I got home from work on March 17, I had turned on the BITX 20 and heard nothing but white noise. No signals. Nada. Zilch. So the following morning my expectations for 20 were quite low. I tuned across the whole band, again hearing nothing. But wait... there was one signal. And he was calling CQ. With an Australian accent. VK6MV! The only signal on the band. I called him with my recently fixed BITX20 (with .12 kW amp) and a dipole. No problem. We had a nice contact.
A look at Roy's QRZ page shows that he is a fellow homebrewer. Clearly, the radio gods were making a statement here.
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Looks like the Rhombic antenna from the VK6 help quite a bit !
ReplyDeletewayne