Been trying to contact 3B7M via CW today on 15m and 10m. I can hear them quite well at S5 or so. Spent a hour calling with no luck.

Is it realistic that I can make a QSO with them with 100W and a wire in their 10 kHz of pileup?

Just had BT Openreach round to fix the phone line and broadband. It was very noisy (phone) and slow (broadband).

Apparently the squirrels have eaten the overhead wire which runs through trees at the edge of our property.

Hopefully when it's all mended the broadband will be less likely to drop out when I transmit on 40m. I'm sure it didn't use to do that.

If only I could get fibre to the home here!

Had a very satisfactory ARRL DX CW contest. I spent 4 hours on the contest during the day and managed 76 QSOs with 37 states and 1 Canadian province.

I didn't quite manage to catch them all but I was pleased with my result 🙂

Some of the QSOs were quite difficult - 100W was only just making it across the pond.

The wife was complaining about the kitchen timer being unreliable. I thought how can such a simple thing be in unreliable?

I changed the battery - all good - or so I thought until I put it on the counter top a bit roughly. Any jolt was causing the battery to disconnect and the timer to reset.

A Scrabble through the junk box to find an electrolytic which would fit in the case (100uF) and it's all fixed. You can take the battery out for 10s now 🤣

The WRTC Award contest is over! I've enjoyed the short CW contacts over the last month.

Highlights would be ZL6WRTC on 80m which was my first and still only antipodean contact on CW!

Managed 283 QSOs which got me 284th place out of all the CW hunters which I'm very pleased with!

Been doing a little CW experiment.

I wrote a program to sniff keyboard presses and output them as morse code with the idea that when I'm working at my computer (in any app) my brain will be learning CW in the background.

I type at 60 wpm when I get going so sending CW at 30 gets a long way behind. It means I get to hear what I've written in CW though!

Not sure this experiment is a keeper but it's been fun.

If anyone wants to give it a go I'll put it on GitHub. Linux only right now though.