30% of JCC-s confirmed

Found a direct card from Hiko-san JR1JAA in my mailbox today. Yamato city from Kanagawa prefecture is my  243-th confirmed JCC which means that 30% of all existing JCC-s are confirmed by qsl cards. Nice going ;)

250-th worked, thank you Laos!

Thursday morning. Minutes before local sunrise. -20.7C/-5F degrees outside. Brrr..

Just before running to work I heard a lonely "CQ CQ de XW3DT" on 12m cw. Rather weak. 559. One answer - and a new one is logged. 250-th. Time to celebrate. I think I'm gonna grab a beer on my way home later today ;)

My first winter aurora.

Mid January. Nice snowy Sunday here in Tallinn. I managed to work 2 new countries despite of a poor propagation on 12m. PJ4C from Bonaire and HK0NA from Malpelo isl. My total count jumped to 249. Later in the evening I received the aurora alert and ran back into the shack. 6m was filled with VERY strange signals. Yeah - it was my first aurora on 6m. I have never worked Sweden before on 6m, since it's a tough path on summers. Yesterday evening I worked 26 different stations from SM. Plus several OH's, LA's, OZ's. It was a lot of fun. Someone should explain me why the heck aurora distorts signals like that ;)

Looking forward for next aurora..

KD4POJ completes my WAS!

2011 has been a great year! Today I went through my last patch of bureau cards and found KD4POJ-s card from North Dakota. This one was a missing piece from my WAS puzzle. What a nice Christmas present ;)

JCC milestone - 20%!

My confirmed JCC count rose to 166, which is 20% of all possible 809 Japan cities.

5000-th station from US!

Time to celebrate - I worked my 5000-th station from USA today. Lucky 'winner' is K7UT, Darryl from Utah.

It was a real struggle to work a US station when I started 2 years ago with my 43ft vertical. Going to 2el wire beam made all the difference. Thank you all for those wonderful QSOs!

Whole list is here http://adok.dyndns.org:8090/country?id=8771325
..and if you want to see them on the map then click http://maps.google.com/maps?t=p&z=5&q=http://adok.dyndns.org:8090/map_country?id=8771325

12m - here I come!

Finished my first ever 12m band antenna. You guessed it - another moxon. First 3 weeks have been above expectations - 540 JA-s and 1128 W-s. If I had to take it down already - I would definately say it was well worth the effort. I intend to leave it up until spring. Hope to work many more during this upcoming cold winter.