As weather doesn't permit some outside works, it's possible to spend some time and write something on the web.

Weather forecast promised that rain will stop falling tomorrow, so we will have couple of days of sun, with higher temperatures. Sure, it will give opportunity to do some work at location, because there are still many things which has to be done there before next contests (as usual).

First priority is to fix resonant frequency on 10m yagi little bit lower. Currently, center frequency is at 28.7 MHz, by design it should be at 28.3 MHz. Still, I don't know what happens with this, is it some problem with EZNec design or we simply made a mistake during antenna construction? Plan is to try to fix this on the tower, with some help from the ground. Antenna isn't big and heavy, but it will be much easier to fix it without putting down, if that will be possible. Also, there are some "non-hamradio" things that has to be done there. We need to do some lawn mowing, but have to wait for grass to dry off after the rain. Some more stuff have to be ordered through e-bay. Most important one is vacuum relays for 160/80 vertical, so it will be possible to switch band and band segments from the shack. I've tried some smaller relays, but they can't survive a little bit more than 500W of output power. Also, according to HFTA software, 15m antenna needs to go a bit higher, but that is something what is plan to fix in late August, or early September. For that, rotor plate should be changed, and also thrust bearing should be mounted above rotor.

These days we also learned on CQ-Contest reflector that CQ contest committee decided to shorten deadline period for sending the logs on 5 days after the contest. It seems great to me, as I always planned to check the log for simple typing errors, or to fix some things notified during the contest, but usually I forget about it and send the log during last couple of days before deadline. Hopefully this would enforce me to send a log in day or two after the contest. It would be interesting to see how UBN reports from some stations would look like if there wouldn't be any "log massaging" in 30 days after the contest, checking the log against eqsl.cc and similar services etc.

Also, I find some time to prepare statistics from IARU HFC 2012 with great SH5 software and it is uploaded on this web. You can find it in statistics menu on the left side of this page. Enjoy.