Solar cycle 24, due to peak in 2010 or 2011 “looks like its going to be one of the most intense cycles since record-keeping began almost 400 years ago,” says solar physicist David Hathaway of the Marshall Space Flight Center. He and colleague Robert Wilson presented this conclusion last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco
Their forecast is based on historical records of geomagnetic storms.
According to their analysis, the next Solar Maximum should peak around 2010 with a sunspot number of 160 plus or minus 25. This would make it one of the strongest solar cycles of the past fifty years—which is to say, one of the strongest in recorded history.

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[tags]propagation,hamradio, amateur radio, solar,sunspots[/tags]

During the last days QSL.net domain has been down. Ham radio community have been missing a large part of it’s web presence, and a valuable part of knowledge.
QSL.NET was started in the winter of 1996 by K3TKJ, and host thousands of ham radio related web sites, email redirection services and mailing lists, for free.
At the time while writing QSL.net is recovering, but I’ve not been able to find any public announce. Rumors, says a maintenance activity is ongoing, someone else reports a server outage.
This downtime should let us think about importance of QSL.net service. I would suggest all those who are using K3TKJ services to donate, or move their web sites somewhere else.
Our knowledge is too important to to be compromised by a single point of failure

Last weeked we joined the ARI italian contest 40 & 80 meters. Even if I’ve never enjoyed so much the italian only competitions, I must admit that I’ve been enthusiast.I operated the IQ5FI, club station, during the day-light hours, so, mostly on fourty meters, and has been a surprise for me, since the frequency was very very busy. SSB contacts were very difficult due to the high QRM and due to the quick change of propagation with fast openings to north and then to south (we are located in the center).

So happened a couple of times, that while I was calling CQ and making contacts into an apparently free frequency, ather a repentine propagation change, stations were reclaming the same frequency because according to them, they were using that short piece of fourty since several minutes…. (and we too) HI !

During high QRM conditions, RTTY and CW contacts payed a lot.

We made 546 QSO’s in the 24 hours, scoring 118000 points, much better than the previous year were we made just 80000.

As for the CQWW SSB, I’ve taken a couple of minutes of recordings, that I’ve edited and published today on Youtube. Most of dialogs are in italian of course, but I’m sure you will be able to understand most of the QSOs…

Watch and comment video on YouTube
[tags]ham radio,contest,ari,amateur radio,contesting,video[/tags]

Design of my cards has finished and my new QSL card is going to be printed. I’ve been working on this card since last month, and I’ve asked some offers all around the world for printing prices. I’ve used my Apple PowerMac G4 with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe (Macromedia) Freehand to produce the final layout, that you can see here. Picture has been taken with a Canon G5 Digital Camera.

About the subject, I’ve had a large choice od themes, considering that my city host so many famous monuments and panoramas but I’ve decided to use the Ponte Vecchio, since is one of the most representative monuments in Florence, and because is not so used by local hams for their QSL cards.
As said before I’ve been asking prices to almost all world wide famous ham radio qsl printers, and finally I’ve decided for IT9EJW service, mainly for clear information contained on his web site and for his competitive prices.
A complete list of links to QSL Printers has driven me for the choice of printing service.
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