{"id":624,"date":"2015-03-19T10:14:00","date_gmt":"2015-03-18T23:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2015\/03\/19\/working-vk6-homebrew-during-the-big-solar-flare\/"},"modified":"2025-07-20T13:25:37","modified_gmt":"2025-07-20T03:25:37","slug":"working-vk6-homebrew-during-the-big-solar-flare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2015\/03\/19\/working-vk6-homebrew-during-the-big-solar-flare\/","title":{"rendered":"Working VK6 Homebrew During the Big Solar Flare"},"content":{"rendered":"
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There I was. 0900 UTC (0 Dark Thirty local), the morning after the big March 17 St. Patrick’s Day Coronal Mass Ejection Impact. Solar Flux Index: 116. A Index: 117! I’d never seen the A Index that high. When I got home from work on March 17, I had turned on the BITX 20 and heard nothing but white noise. No signals. Nada. Zilch. So the following morning my expectations for 20 were quite low. I tuned across the whole band, again hearing nothing. But wait… there was one signal. And he was calling CQ. With an Australian accent. VK6MV! The only signal on the band. I called him with my recently fixed BITX20 (with .12 kW amp) and a dipole. No problem. We had a nice contact. <\/strong>
A look at Roy’s QRZ page shows that he is a fellow homebrewer. Clearly, the radio gods were making a statement here. <\/strong><\/p>\n

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Our book: “SolderSmoke — Global Adventures in Wireless Electronics” http:\/\/soldersmoke.com\/book.htm<\/a> Our coffee mugs, T-Shirts, bumper stickers: http:\/\/www.cafepress.com\/SolderSmoke<\/a> Our Book Store: http:\/\/astore.amazon.com\/contracross-20<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There I was. 0900 UTC (0 Dark Thirty local), the morning after the big March 17 St. Patrick’s Day Coronal Mass Ejection Impact. Solar Flux Index: 116. A Index: 117! I’d never seen the A Index that high. When I got home from work on March 17, I had turned on the BITX 20 and … Continue reading “Working VK6 Homebrew During the Big Solar Flare”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":625,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,27,80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-australia","category-propagation","category-solar-cycle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":627,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624\/revisions\/627"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}