In 2022 the Netherlands part of the Thales Group is celebrating that 100 years ago its predecessor, which was last known as Hollandse Signaalapparaten, was founded. As part of many festivities a special event station was operational between 21 April 2022 and 31 December 2022. This SES was operated by a number of radio amateurs …
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Category:Blog
My first year on HF
Exactly one year ago (15th of May 2020) I made my first QSO on HF, this was with Vladimir R2AL in FT8 on the 20 meter band. Since then I have made 5273 QSOs of which 3323 have been confirmed by QSL. In total I have worked 142 different DXCC entities of which 136 have …
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Trouble with decoding byte 0xFA
What kind of cryptic title is this? For the process of my ADIF log, which I collect daily from LoTW, I have written a small tool. This tool uses a few standard Python libraries. One of them has been giving me an error message for the last two days, causing my tool to fail. The …
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QSO with FT8 robots
They have found me. “Who?” you might ask. Well, the FT8 robots. At first I thought, ‘Nice, some of my fellow amateurs would like yet another FT8 QSO on this band when we already had a confirmed QSO.’ and jokingly called them ‘fans’ but now I know better. Not everyone likes the FT8 protocol because …
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My first APRS beacon received by ISS
Tonight (24th November 2020) I finally succeeded; the ISS has received my APRS beacon. Danny PD2WR gave me the correct settings for my TH-D74 portable radio and see there, success. Danny, thank you again. The ISS came over late in the evening, the maximum elevation was just 26 degrees above the horizon. Yet this was …
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Creating profiles on Ham websites
Right after I got the conformation my call sign registration was approved I created basic profiles on some of the well-known Ham related websites. Some of these profiles are QRZ.com, HamQTH.com and QRZCQ.com. It is wise to have a profile on the QRZ.com and QRZCQ.com websites as these two websites are often used as a …
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Call sign registration confirmed
It is official, from now on I will be known on the air (and a bit on the internet) as PA8S 😉 . The results of the exam of 8 January, see this post, are confirmed by the governing body here in The Netherlands and my requested call sign is assigned to me. I have …
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Full licence exam
After a short period of putting my nose in the course book almost every available evening, today I have successfully passed the exam for a Dutch ‘F registratie’, the official name of the full license here in The Netherlands. The full license, as issued by The Netherlands government is a CEPT Full license (covered by …
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