Video of trip to K6KPH, California

I was lucky enough to visit the Maritime Radio Historical Society's old KPH sites at Bolinas and Point Reyes, California, in September.

If you haven't heard of these they were the transmitter and receiver sites for KPH - the mighty Pacific coastal station that sent Morse code and RTTY to ships and point-to-point services until the late 1990s.

Both sites are now restored and they also run K6KPH - an amateur station. They were kind enough to let me operate some CW as well, letting me make contacts across the USA on 14MHz.

You can find out more at: www.radiomarine.org

I shot a seven-minute video while I was there too - you can see us working G3LDI back in the UK on 20m CW. Go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wj-IwYPrtTM

More free propagation books

The late Bob Brown NM7M was an expert on ionospheric propagation. He wrote a number of great books and two of these are now available as free downloads on Carl K9LA's site.

The first is the The Little Pistol's Guide to HF Propagation

The second, on Top Band (160m propagation), is NM7M The Big Gun's Guide to Low-Band Propagation

Carl has a lot more useful information as well - see just go to http://k9la.us/

Steve G0KYA

RSGB Convention, October 2012

I will be giving two presentations at this year's RSGB Convention - one on using HF propagation prediction programs and the other on modelling antennas using MMANA-GAL.

I have made the presentations available as PDF downloads should anyone want them. I'm not sure they will make a lot of sense without the accompanying talk, but you are welcome to them anyway.

Don't forget there is a free book that you can download that explains a lot about HF and LF propagation - see the link on the right.

Here are the links: 

• Using HF Propagation Prediction Programs (1.7Mb PDF)
• Modelling antennas with MMANA-GAL (8.4Mb PDF)