[UK-CONTEST] Commonwealth Contest - GB5CC

[Dave Sergeant]

On 15 Mar 2009 at 22:28, Steve Knowles wrote:

> The HF antenna was a five-ele trapped tribander, up 44ft.  For 40m, a
> full-wave verticallly polarised loop.  On 80m we elected to run with a
> vertically polarised loop (130 x 40ft) rather than use the alternative
> low dipole, as we would get better results to DX. The QTH is a domestic
> plot in an urban area of mixed residential and industrial developments
> and is in a small N-S valley about 50ft asl.  We always have a high
> noise level on 80 and 40, but this weekend was particularly bad and the
> elevated K-index didn't help, I'm sure.

I wonder if Quin has looked into this noise and whether it is due to 
the current noise problems associated with unfiltered PC PSUs or PLT/BT 
Vision Comtrend adaptors? We had a demo of these Comtrend devices at 
our local club last night and it was an eye opener - they have pretty 
sharp filters for the amateur bands which are fairly effective but can 
still cause increase of the noise level there, outside the amateur 
bands they are a disaster and effectively wipe out everything. Might be 
worth having a check for this, BT Vision has spread prolifically in the 
past year (although I have not had any problems here yet). A complaint 
to Ofcom can only help boost the statistics for the scale of the 
problem.

(I have a short summary of PLT etc on my website at 
http://www.davesergeant.com/qrp/emc.htm and there is of course the 
UKQRM Yahoogroup)

73 Dave G3YMC

http://www.davesergeant.com