Been a while.....but got my first DXpedition in the log

Nearly a whole month since my last update and unfortunately work has kept me off the radio for a while. I have however managed to add in some additional countries with India, Indonesia, South Korea, Finland and now the DXpedition to Norfolk Island in the log.

VK9NT are running a DXpedition to Norfolk Island at the moment and I managed to get a solid contact on 40 metres. The VK9NT expedition page is http://vk9nt.odxg.org/index.html

Siberia? Nearly... nearly....kindof.

Barely made it into Siberia today - a lot of QSB on 28.480 but RK9UN - Oleg and I managed to swap callsigns all the same, and signal reports......I think. Let's see if he confirms the QSO in his QRZ log.......

Annoying antennas and other updates

I had some problems last night with the antenna giving me a high SWR intermittently. It didn't seem to matter what I did or what rig I was using I was getting a reasonable SWR reading and then a high one. The antenna tuner was struggling bringing it into something usable and it switched back and forth for a while until I came to the conclusion that my 25 year old 11m vertical is due for retirement.....so I bought a new one. I gave Peter a call at Shockwave Antennas - http://shockwaveantennas.com/ - and after a quick chat settled on just replacing the Station Master with like for like. Some advice on tuning the antenna length for 10m and that was it. I'm looking forward to retiring the current vertical and putting up the new one, I also have a new connector coming and will dump about 5 inches of the RG213 in case I have some water in the coax. Hopefully the intermittent problems will disappear after that although...it is behaving itself really well at the moment. Doh!!!

Other items of note are that the LDG Z11 auto antenna tuner has arrived, gave it a quick test and it worked well. A bit noisy when cycling it's relays during a tune but nothing to worry about. It's about an inch smaller width-wise than the Dragon SS485H I'm looking to pair it with but no problems on depth. Should work well portable.

I also have another 3 antennas on the way: 1 Military HF antenna ~2.7 metres in length, a 10m dipole, and a super flexy antenna for my VX-7 handheld. Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS) has bitten hard. I also have an old Kenwood 2 metre VHF rig on the way which I'll pop into the car to replace the scanner I have now returned to the shack.

The Standard licence study material has arrived from the Radio and Electronics School (RES) - http://res.net.au/ - so it's time to knuckle down with the books and get to work on the passing the theory and reg exams.

And the last thing I have done is to install the HRD suite of Ham software. I'm not fussed on the remote control stuff but the HRD Logbook app certainly looks complete.