Sunday 25 November 2012

136kHz QRSS DX then a Disaster!

11-12 November: Conditions were good and DK7FC was received well by JA7NI at Japanese sunrise (see picture below). Unfortunately, my own QRSS120 transmission was not visible.

I then ran QRSS120 (extremely slow Morse with a dot length of 120 seconds) overnight on 136.17175kHz. VE1VDM received my signals, but not very strongly (see the lower trace on the picture of his grabber below).

Reception at TF3HZ was excellent for several hours as can be seen by the traces below.


The lower picture shows that my transmission had a problem around 0250, recovered, then stopped completely just after 0300UTC.

The reason was a fire in my main loading coil which sits in a large plastic box on top of a flat roof extension to the house.The coil was completely destroyed and there was significant damage to the extension roof, the adjacent conservatory and the gutter and soffit above.
All that was left of my loading coil and its box

The back of the house is a mess

So the bad news is I am off the air for a while, but the good news is I was insured. Oh, and I am still alive.