Friday, November 6, 2015

Back at the Helm

Well it’s now nearly 8 months since my unlucky experience and I have to say at last I’m beginning to feel fully back to normal.
The tiredness has gone and my brain seems to be reasonably engaged (the XYL would probably disagree with that!) and the CW seems to be coming back although I am suffering with what I would call CW block which is a more common problem of fear of sending. I just force myself on air and once I’m actually sending the fear goes away. The other problem I have is when I'm tired things seem to go backwards in the CW dept and I have to learn to be very patient, sometimes I have good days and sometimes bad.

The bands are not that good at the moment and I’m limited to the European stations, I haven’t heard the States for a while now which is rather disappointing. But I 've kept on the low bands for most of the time trying to build up speed with the local community.

Sometimes I look at the kit I have and feel I really do have too much, especially in the transceiver department! Kenwood TS 570 with SP23 speaker, Elecraft K2 and various kits all lie about used every so often but not nearly enough. Then there’s what I call the battleship, the Yaesu FT2000D which now I have got used to, a fine radio with excellent DSP capabilities and is a good rig for my CW antics and a lovely speaker, the Palstar SP30H. I must admit when I bought it I was going for its little sister the SP30, but the shop offered a large discount if I paid a little extra for the 30H and I’m very pleased I did, such a bass sounding speaker SSB sounds like FM radio all the time, brilliant!

I’m not a contester more quick CW contact, chat and move on, exploring the bands and seeing what’s about each day. I like to spread across the bands in my search even doing a bit of short wave listening, if you never tried its great fun.

Unfortunately with the recovery  I have had to return to work and am now back full time which is creating less time for the radio work. But I must be grateful for my health and do the Radio hobby when the time is right.