Steve's Place

Photography and Astrophotography

Home Station

Well, the bug has bitten once again and I am back into contesting. I no longer have a rare location so I will now have to battle for the points and more so as I use low power and only a modest antenna setup.

Main callsign is G4KIV but I have recently acquired a special contest call G1G.

Previous calls include: ZC4BS ZC40BS ZC4BBS ZC4ESB ZC40ESB ZD8SB N5ZFR also contested from G6M.

Modes: CW, SSB and Data modes mostly include RTTY and FT8/FT4 

Equipment:  Yaesu FT2000, Prosistel PST1524TV, Cobwebb, Inverted L (160/80/40), MicroHam Digi Keyer II and Wintest/SD/N1MM for contesting.

Club: none (looking for a club to represent)

10/10 number: 52763

WAB Square: TA07 and WAB book: 10108 and 24424

Four headed workstation running Wintest and K1EL morse keyer
Prosistel PST1524TV – good antenna covering 40, 20, 15 and 10m – (with 40m especially good)
Original Cobwebb – covering all bands 20 – 10m (perfect resonance around the data frequencies for each band)
Short inverted L for 160/80/40 – not very high but surprisingly effective design by G0CSK

With the addition of the MicroHam Digi Keyer II, I have now started to play with some of the “newer” data modes including WSPR (Weak Signal Propagation Reporter) and more recently FT8/FT4 which are great ways to check propagation paths and antenna capabilities.

QSL Info – I no longer issue paper QSL cards and instead use a mix of QRZ.com, Logbook Of The World (LOTW) and ClubLog. I have to give special thanks to Doug (N6RT) from DX.QSL.NET who helped me recover over 32,000 QSO’s from my ZC4 expeditions. I thought I had lost these due to a corrupt hard drive. This will make a lot of radio hams very happy now they can verify the contact. Thanks Doug 🙂

Future work will involve building additional antennas – perhaps something similar to a 4 square for either 10m or 15m and a remote antenna switch. First project however will be a 10m Moxon which may progress to a 10m/15m Moxon.

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