Over the past month or so, I've been transitioning away from a rubbish terrestrial microwave broadband link to one supplied by a different route - a mobile phone network, as it turned out. Living in the countryside does have distinct frustrations. At least I managed to avoid paying £400 for a satellite broadband system...
Whilst I'd normally operate JT65A during the evening, when the kids are in bed, it was a little difficult to synchronise the PC clock without a net connection, even though I could do it using a radio-controlled wall clock.
So, I turned to PSK for the first time in a while.
Often, PSK seems to deliver less DX and more local QSOs for the same propagation conditions, although some surprises can happen. One of these came about on 15m the other day, during the afternoon on a band that was empty apart from the faint, intermittently-readable PSK-31 trace on my screen.
It turned out that weak trace was from AH6V - Hawaii! Whilst I've bagged several HI QSOs, it's always nice to hear from that archipelago, so I tried a call, not really expecting my vpol delta loop and about 30Watts (unusually high power for me), would cut it.
Luckily, after a slight increase to about 40Watts, I managed to get all the details across and have them confirmed back. Given that PSK isn't very robust in the face of poor conditions, I was very pleased!
PSK-63 later returned a lovely signal from XU7TZG, which I was equally happy to bag for the day's DX list.
The beauty of PSK is its large uptake amongst hams, and the speed with which a QSO proceeds. Unlike JT65, where you might spend hours grabbing something unusual, PSK lets you scan around the bands, give a quick call if you want to, and find something interesting quite quickly. It also doesn't need any clock synchronisation at all, which is a big plus!
So, there you go. Always give a 'dead band' a go, and respect the benefits of the PSK modes!
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