M0YKS Satellite Earth Station ? The amateur Radio hobby has so much to offer and can take you to places you cannot ever go to in person. Yes I am referring to space and in particular the International Space Station. The past couple of weeks have provided some great late evening passes from ISS and I have been making the most of the opportunities. My log is full of ISS, Teval SATs, RS-44 SAT, JO-97 SAT and SO-50 SAT contacts. It's been good and my Earth Station is still working well for me.  A quick run down of the equipment that I am using: TX RX - YAESU FT-847 Rotator - YAESU G-5500 I ..read more

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I hope you're new year has begun well. I have been feeling much more like myself after being ill before and over the Christmas break.  My FTDX101mp has been getting plenty of use and I have been enjoying operating on 29Mhz AM. I have been doing quite well with my MA5B and 50 watts out working across the Atlantic into North America. I must say it is a very nice sounding signal on AM and it has great DX potential for an original old school mode that most have forgotten or never tried. How about giving 29.00 to 29.100 AM a listen and give it a go yourself. The best time to try is Saturday an ..read more

Thanks for following me through 2023 via the various online methods. It's been a strange year but radio propagation has been good. Thanks for all the many QSOs I made with some of you throughout the year via HF and satellite bands.  Have a Merry Christmas or nice relaxing holiday. Which ever it is enjoy and best season greetings, good DX 73. Simon M0YKS ..read more

Another fantastic CQWW SSB weekend with more stations active than ever,  I was having so much fun operating alongside Elsie M7ELC and we were both making plenty of DX operating short shift patterns as we kept the hot seat hot with my FTDX101MP and Cushcraft MA5B antenna. I did reasonably well as you can see my QSO footprint for 80, 40, 20, 15 and 10 meters. I made 500 QSOs, in total worked 21 zones and 87 Countries across the globe. Saturday was the best day for DX but day two was still quite good in some directions. M7ELC was very patent and waited, called, waited again called some mor ..read more

 The latest solar cycle 25 is proving to be far better than we could of hoped. We all seem to be experiencing regular unusually good long distance openings on 29 MHz. Earlier this afternoon I got back from College and managed to get the radio on earlier than usual. Straight away I could hear that 10 meters was wide open as the 28 MHz SSB portion was full of signals. I had a nice QSO on 10 metes SSB into North America and then proceeded further up the band to 29 MHz using FM. Again activity was up and I could hear a number of North American stations calling CQ on straight FM. There were ..read more

  This afternoon I was listening for signals on 29MHz AM when I heard a great signal coming acroaa the Atlantic from Milford, Massachusetts. K1ETP Rich peaking at 5/9+10db. I was trying out the AM Mode to see how well it performed with my FTDX101MP. I have already had success on this mode as I previously made AM contacts with this radio on 20M into Europe when I made a QSO into Sweden. More recently I have been trying to catch some more AM on 10 Meters. I am interested in seeing how the FTDX101MP performance is on AM. This contact was absolutely fantastic and possibly one of the cleares ..read more

This week has been extremely good on 10 Meters FM. I have been working lots North and Central America on FM as well as a nice one into The Western Sahara. The clarity on FM has been superb as I experienced great conditions whilst playing around with my YAESU FTDX101MP. I even got a QSO into Mexico working XE2ARP on 29 MHz FM, Awesome! The SSB operating has also been great on all of the bands, I heard a station from North America on 80m early morning and 40-10 has been great with signals coming in from Japan, Australia as well as North and South America.  My Satellite operations ..read more

 I arrived home after work and decided to check out 10m before the sun went down and we hit the grey-line. The New York repeater was up at 5/9+20 as was VE3MMX -R, both were easy to access with 100w.  Tonight I was looking for AM signals so I swept the band carefully listening out for signals from the USA hoping to find someone using AM. I came across one very weak signal but decided to try again at another time, as I tuned back up the band I heard WA3JR Joe calling CQ on FM simplex. Joe was 5/7 at times with QSB, we had a pretty good qso that was crystal clear Q5 at times. The strai ..read more

 My ground station was working well at my location here in Yorkshire earlier today, the NOAA weather  Satellites were coming in well on 137 MHz as NA-18 and NA-19  passed by   NOAA 18 Pass NOAA 19 second Pass  The full reception and decode can be seen here below in the video I made. I use WXtoIMG as previously mentioned . This software will auto track weather satellites and decode weather images from a simple 137 MHz FM receiver set up using a laptop/PC with the receiver audio fed into the line or mic in.  Here in my ham radio shack I use addition ..read more