Either way I will not give up, and have registered http://www.callbook.org.uk in anticipation of getting the data hopefully within the next couple of weeks.

If your interested in knowing when the site is like just use the form on the site and I’ll drop you a note once its live.

I wasn’t disappointed the band seemed alive. and ended up working 12 stations most of them where new for me on 6m.

EA3J, F5MMF, F4EZJ, C37NL, EA1CJ, EA2DR, I0SNY, EA3MS, EA3GBV, IW0BSQ, EA6/M0DLL, EA6CC

I’ve been running the Sandaysoft Culumus software since October last year and have nothing but praise for the software, it allows you to do everything from downloading data from weather station base units, to Tweeting the information. One thing I’ve always thought was the themes for web pages weren’t up to much so the I spent some time this month developing my own but in a way it could be useful to others.

The idea was to use a local city/town scape background then display all the different areas of data within boxes, its also easily customisable if you want to add more menu tabs and extra content you can see a live copy of the theme at http://wx.prettygoodprojects.com/

The theme and all its files including PSD files are hosted on Github http://github.com/magicbug/Culumus-Weather-Theme/ your free to download, use, tinker.

MW0CRI operating RTTY

On arrival at the station we started setting up the three operating positions, this year we were going to operate some RTTY too so we setup Win-Test with MMTTY, this was the first time I’d used the MMTTY engine so it was a little bit hit and miss setting up but there seemed to be no issues.

Marconi Day lasted for the whole 24hrs of the 25th of April, and we run it contest style allowing us to work as many as possible and in theory helping those wanting to work as many stations as possible for the awards. Conditions early Saturday morning seemed very poor  but at day break 40m soon picked up, and we started to work into Europe at times the pile up never seemed to end either people really wanted to work the station or spotted the pile up and had to get it in the logbook!

Simon (M0CLW)

We also got some reasonably decent runs on 20m Saturday afternoon into North America to my surprise K2DBK took a short recording of me operating you can listen by going to http://k2dbk.com/gb6md.mp3 conditions did seem to go very poor again around 4pm.

Peter (G4MJS)

Saturday evening seemed good we were able to work into JA on 40m CW without too much problem, but 80m SSB was hard work with poor conditions it seemed and lots of noise. Later on though during the last hour 11-midnight was able to get a really good run on 40m into the US and parts of SA, the run just kept going and gave me a serious adrenaline rush and stations were giving 59+ reports.

At the end of the day we made over 3000 QSOs,  there was always lots of banter going on in the background and plenty of beer lets hope next year is just as good.

I’ll post a report once I get home after the weekend, I’ll also no doubt be putting tweets up on Twitter @m3php

You can find more information at

• G6PZ.com
• International Marconi Day

With the QFH its decoding from well above the top of Iceland all the way down to Algeria, and best of all the images are mostly noise free. the antenna is only about 10 feet off the ground attached to the rose arch in the garden.

You can have a look at the images at http://wx.prettygoodprojects.com/apt/daily/ their uploaded a couple of minutes after each pass automatically by the software.

Friday morning soon arrived and I took the train down to the station, unlucky for me there was signalling problems between Swindon and Bristol which messed things up a bit and I had to change twice around the edge of Bristol before catching a connection to Weston but arrived and met by Mark (M0DXR), Simon (M0CLW) and Simon (2E0CVN).

Once arriving at the shack there was some antenna work to be done like cranking up the MonstIR which was seriously hard work as the antenna weights a ton! after a while though we soon had it up. and finished putting up the Clark field mast up which Paul had already setup and got it up to 30m it looked huge! which was to support the 160m antenna once we built that.. once all the antennas were up it was dark and we retreated to the shack to get the computers setup.

Simon (M0CLW) on mults duty

The contest started soon after and I was on the mults station on 40m was easy to pick-up the multipliers then but as the hours progressed it soon started to get harder, we did have an issue in the very early hours when the 160m antenna wouldn’t tune! but that was soon fixed in daylight, but we got some good runs into NA on 40m and good conditions into the far east. Conditions Sunday towards the end of the contest were not so great.

Score breakdown

 BAND   QSO DUP  PFX  POINTS   AVG
-----------------------------------
  160   145   0   37     294  2.03
   80   743   8  317    1784  2.40
   40   868   8  317    2987  3.44
   20  1438   8  415    3218  2.24
   15   127   0   75     337  2.65
   10     0   0    0       0  0.00
-----------------------------------
TOTAL  3321  24 1161    8620  2.60
===================================
     TOTAL SCORE : 10 007 820

The beams

The station performed great and was a breeze to use the IC7800 & IC7700 and we put the built in voice keyers to good use, all the options seemed in similar places on both and the filtering was effective for contesting environment. The stacked SteppIRs were excellent making working into NA pretty easy! and having a beam on 40m was very cool.

Overall had a fantastic weekend, great company and decent pileups, I was however was completely shattered Monday morning while returning home!

Best DX was probably being called by a JA on 20m Saturday morning just before lunch and J5 and LT0 in the evening, sadly didn’t manage to work any VK but think that’s bad timing on my part.

Station Equipment: Yaesu FT-950, Radioworks 80m Windom, Signalink USB and MixW.

Summary:

       QSO    DX    JA    W    VE    VK    Cont
80m    18     12    0     0    0     0     1
40m    42     19    0     2    1     0     3
20m    71     30    1     6    3     0     5
Total  131    40    1     6    3     0     5

Score: 131*(40+1+6+3+0)*5 = 32750 points

What TweetWX does is searches twitter for the weather terms “Wind, Barometer, Temperature, Rain, Humidity” then shows the tweets in a timeline  this refreshes every 40 seconds with any new weather tweets available.

Each time it reads a tweet it also checks to see if we’ve stored it in our database if not it collects its profile data and stores it so its available as a list on the site for users to find all the current stations available!

The whole site took 1 day to code using the PHP framework CodeIgniter, You can check it out by visiting http://www.magicbug.co.uk/tweetwx

Tweets get sent out every Wednesday at 13:30 UTC I decided on this day because it was mid week, when people are starting to think about the upcoming week if anyone disagrees leave a comment.

Each contest for the coming weekend gets its own tweet with the contest name and the url to find the rules. So if your a twitter user follow @DXAnywhere plus you’ll get a wealth of other useful radio data in your twitter stream!