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What’s New

I seldom QSL non-ham stations, but when

WENR AM ran a DX test back in March, I sent

a reception report and received this E-QSL a

few days ago.

I have been monitoring 90.9 MHz for band openings, but nothing has occurred like the big E-skip opening on June 11. 

Conditions were promising this morning when I tuned through the NOAA weather channels and heard WXM60 in Southard, New Jersey on 162.450. Normally, 162.450 is dead quiet here, so any reception on .450 bodes well for the FM band. And I began monitoring 90.9.

There were stations just above the noise on 90.9, but I could not identify anything. One station was stronger briefly and announced a Missouri area code phone number, but that was not enough information to identify it (the “Missouri” station was playing jazz and none of the 90.9 Missouri FM stations listed on Radio-Locator had jazz as their format).  

And that’s all she wrote.

90.9 was jumping!

The past few weeks, I have been checking 90.9 MHz every morning for DX. (90.9 is one of the few unoccupied FM channels around here, so if I hear anything on 90.9, it is DX and the band is open.)

WBUR out of Boston was strong a couple of mornings and an unknown religious station was deep in the mud a couple of mornings (too deep to identify).

Friday morning, the band went wild! At times, there were two or three stations fading in and out at the same time. The E-skip lasted for almost three hours and I probably heard eight stations that I could not identify and four stations that I could identify (three new stations for the log and one relog).

1500 UTC: W215CJ in Tampa, Florida, 1096 miles to the south-southwest running only 25 or 38 watts!

1604 UTC: WOWB in Brewton, Alabama, 1058 miles to the southwest transmitting 100,000 watts.

1620 UTC: WJAB in Huntsville, Alabama, 876 miles to the south-southwest transmitting 100,000 watts.

1700 UTC: KUNI in Cedar Falls, Iowa, 971 miles to the west-northwest transmitting 94,000 watts (KUNI was a relog that I heard last summer)

All stations were heard with my ICOM IC-R8600 receiver and ICOM AH-7000 discone antenna.

LuG (Loop under Ground) Antenna

Last post, I wrote that I would be doing a lot of antenna work during the next few weeks. A few days later, my lawn mower ate another Loop on Ground (LoG) antenna! That is two springs in a row that I lost a LoG to the mower, so I decided that I would not put down another LoG unless I could find a workaround for my hungry lawn mower.

I decided to bury the antenna just deep enough to avoid the mower, but not too deep as to affect reception. I bought some new RG6 coax, heavier gauge enameled copper wire, Channel Master balun and a saw-tooth border edger to slice open 120 feet of lawn.

It took about an hour to slice the lawn and another hour to put down the copper wire generously using lawn staples to keep the wire below ground level. By the way, the stainless steel lawn staples seem to have no effect on the operation of the antenna. Another by the way, I turned the new antenna about 30° counter-clockwise compared to the old LoGs so that its axes now lie 0°/180° and 90°/270°.

After connecting the balun and coax and running the coax up to the shack, I anxiously turned on the IC-R8600 and I was very disappointed. All signals were weak. There were no signals on frequencies that I normally hear signals and 1600 to 1710 kHz was totally dead. [There is a Department of Transportation Travelers Information Station (DOT TIS) 3 miles away on 1670 that blasts in here normally and there was nothing to hear on 1670 with the new antenna.]

I thought maybe the antenna being sunk in the ground was the cause even though at the most, the antenna was only a half-inch below the surface. So I went out and lifted the whole antenna out of the ground and returned to the radio, but it did not make any difference.

My next guess was that the new balun might be the culprit, so I swapped it for the old balun and 1600 to 1710 kHz came back to life, but all the signals were still weak or non-existent. That left the coax and the copper wire as culprits. Except for a break in the enameled copper wire, I could not figure out how the wire could be bad. That left the coax, so I replaced the new RG6 coax with the old RG59 and that solved the problem. Bad RG6!

I pushed the copper back down into the ground and the signal levels were exactly the same with the antenna on top of the lawn and with the antenna underground by 1/4 inch to 1/2 inch depth.

Next day, I cut the lawn and the antenna survived.

May Day

Two things: new radio and new logging.

I purchased a new radio, an ICOM IC-7300 transceiver. And with it, I logged a new station, WEZR relaying ’80s oldies station WIGY on 780 kHz transmitting 18 watts from Rumford, Maine, 234 miles to the north-northeast. Antenna was the 128-foot Loop-on-Ground.

Next few weeks, I will be doing a lot of antenna work.