If you’ve read the first post in this series or are playing along yourself, you’ll be aware of the 52 Week Ham Radio Challenge. If not, hit up that link for the details!
This post covers the challenges from weeks 29-32, which were:
- Make your own xOTA activation.
- Make a contact with another participant of the challenge
- Try a mode you have never tried before.
- Listen to a broadcast station from another country
Week 29 (14-20 Jul): Make your own xOTA activation.
Well, if you insist…
This week’s challenge was timed to coincide with POTA’s Support your Parks Summer weekend, so I was going to be out anyway, and the challenge was almost automatically a success!
I didn’t have a lot of free time and was still recovering from a cold, so I didn’t want to venture too far or spend that long chatting on this activation. Luckily, a number of local nature reserves have just been added to the POTA system in my area—not great for my completionist tendencies, but it does provide more local options for when I don’t fancy half an hour or more in the car.
GB-5148 Millhams Mead was the target today, a strange out-of-the-way nature reserve where public access is limited to paths and overgrown woodland around the edge of grazing fields. Still, it has a nice stream where swans nest, a lot of sloe and blackberry bushes along with apple trees, and (in basically only one spot) enough open space to support a 40m dipole antenna.
35 was the total QSO count in around 75 minutes of operating. The bands were in odd shape this afternoon, particularly 20m, where I was inaudible to some people and 59+ to others at roughly the same distance. That meant my park-to-park hunting was largely unsuccessful, netting only two QSOs, though while running the frequency I had five more park-to-park stations call in.
As a bonus, Millhams Mead is right next to St Andrew’s Church, where I attended as a child. Looking at it now, it seems a lot smaller than I remember! The main building and the church tower both date from the 13th Century, which also feels a lot more significant as an adult than it did when I was dragged here every Sunday as a kid. The town of Bournemouth itself is a mere youngster at 200 years old, but it grew up fast, until this church ended up firmly within its borders.
Well, this Ham Challenge post is fast devolving into a POTA Activation Report, so in keeping with tradition I’d better drag out the childhood photos too. While I don’t think I have any at Millhams Mead, I certainly do at St Andrew’s: here’s my baptism in 1987.
Back-right is my grandad Bob, a life-long SWL but never a Ham as far as I know. I remember building a crystal AM radio receiver with him when I was about 9 or 10 years old, one of those moments that probably helped to set in motion what that would eventually become my career and my hobbies. He sadly passed away in 2004. 73, Grandad.
Week 30 (21-27 Jul): Make a contact with another participant of the challenge
Sadly, my own schedule this week made any contacts unlikely, and a solar storm made conditions during my only free time on Sunday afternoon totally unworkable. A couple of skeds didn’t come through, and while I tried to work Tobias DC1TC and Harm DK4HAA during their POTA activation, I couldn’t hear them on either 20 or 40.
However, these challenges don’t necessarily have to be done in the scheduled week, so I went back through my logs for 2025 and cross-referenced them against people who have participated in the Ham Challenge so far. So far I have worked:
- Tobias DC1TC on 2 Feb, 9 Mar & 14 May
- Peter DL6PL on 2 Feb & 22 Feb
- Alex KR1ST on 2 Jan & 18 Jan
- Richard YO3GND on 9 Mar & 14 Mar
On that basis, I’m calling week 30 a success.
Week 31 (28 Jul - 3 Aug): Try a mode you have never tried before.
I got slightly ahead of the game with this one; in a conversation with Richard YO3GND about the challenge for Week 30 he mentioned exotic digimodes, so I decided to try one out.
Hellschreiber has stood out to me for a while as an interesting mode I’d like to try. It has an interesting appearance, with text rendered in a ticker-tape style replicating the original physical Hellschreiber machines. Within each column, the vertical pixels are repeated twice, duplicating the content to compensate for any timing variation so as to leave at least one version of the text visible. Admittedly this is not the greatest mode for people with astigmatism, but I put my glasses on, fired up fldigi and gave it a shot.
By chance, I had timed my testing attempt within half an hour of the scheduled EU Feld Hell Net which uses the FSK Hell-105 mode at 1000Z on Saturday mornings, alternating between the 20 and 30 metre bands. Unfortunately it seems like the net didn’t seem to go ahead, but I did catch a CQ call from Werner DL1RI and had a short QSO with him around the time the net would have taken place.
One important lesson learned for me: fldigi doesn’t stop transmitting automatically at the end of a message! I’m sure it does for other modes I’ve used it for, such as RTTY, but apparently this doesn’t apply to Hell—to send your “…” and stop transmitting, you need to manually toggle it back into receive mode.
Like most exotic digimodes there’s not much Hell activity around, but I may come back to it now and again. There was some talk a few weeks back on the OARC Discord about SOTA activations using obscure modes, so if I can convince myself to carry a laptop into the field, I may try a Hellschreiber-only SOTA activation some time!
Week 32 (4-10 Aug): Listen to a broadcast station from another country
An easy one to finish the set.
At this time of year you can sometimes hear French FM stations, but sadly the VHF propagation wasn’t quite good enough today. However, there’s always the old dependable, China Radio International, sat just above the 40m band to remind you you’ve spun the dial too far.
On Wednesday evening around 1900Z, I tuned in to 7210kHz AM for some soothing Chinese traditional music, followed by news or propaganda or something else in a language I don’t speak!
That’s all for this round-up, see you in early September for the results of weeks 33 to 36.
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