I have done some travelling lately, so not too much radio activity.
I did a bit of WSPRing, both with my new Zachtek (200mW) WSPR transmitter, and I am planning setting up a 40m EFHW antenna for wotking on the 40-20-15-10m bands, possibly also 50MHz, if the antenna has a sufficiently low SWR on all bands. This can run whenever I am home, and not active on those bands.
I have run a bit of FT8 on 10m, the band has woken up considerably after the autumn equinox, as was to be expected at this time of the solar cycle.
I will likely make some experiments on the 160 and 630m bands during the winter, we shall see.
New (horizontal) 23cm antenna system will have to wait until next year.
If I can find sufficient time, I will try to improve my portable microwave system. The IC-905 with everything is getting heavy when I need to carry it to a hilltop alone.
I will likely try out an SG-Lab transverter for 1296, accompanied by a 25W power amplifier, fed with the IC-705 transceiver. This is a much lighter setup for portable 1296MHz, with the extra power output available.
I also have a Pluto SDR and some Raspberry Pi computers. I should try to get that up and running, at least as a test. The Pluto can be made to run (extremely low power) from 70MHz to 6GHz, so there is basis for experiments on 4m, 2m, 70cm, 23cm, 13cm, 9cm and 6cm. That setup could also be used as a back-end for transverters for higher frequencies, e.g. 10 and 24GHz.
