Well, I’ve had my mobile HF rig for a couple of weeks now and I’ve made some contacts on HF, though most of them have been while stationary rather than while actually driving. Coming back into Ottawa from a friend’s cottage on Sunday, however, I was almost able to work a station in Denver, but the band faded before we could establish a QSO. Oh well.

One of the major problems I had to overcome was interference from the various electronic bits that make my Tracker go. I resolved most of them with a pair of clip-on ferrite cores mounted on the power leads right up by the radio. It’s amazing how effective they are. Without them, I had QRM from the vehicle measuring about S6 or S7 — basically blotting everything out. With them, it’s virtually eliminated and using the noise blanker feature in the radio anything left over is pretty much eliminated. Not bad for $3.50, eh?

I’ve also sent off my first batch of QSL cards (click the picture to see a larger version). Most of them were to lighthouses and lightships that were taking part in an on-the-air event a couple of weekends ago, mostly to US stations. One card, however, went off to Portugal for a station that I talked to from the cottage that was on a dxpedition to one of the islands in the Azores.