Happy New Year to all my readers. It has thawed out here enough to get back to almost normal and catch up on a couple of the jobs that were on hold due to the cold weather here in the UK.
One job I was dreading was the possibility that Kate had killed off the 7Ah battery that runs the light in one of the outposts of a railway in North Yorkshire that I seem to have become one of the resident engineers on. This battery runs a 6W striplight, and is charged by a solar panel that gives out a massive 135mA when the sun comes out. In November it'd had a lot of use one night and was down as she put it to dim and flickering. However, despite it not getting above zero degrees for a couple of weeks and not a vast amount of full sunlight it measured 13.4V across it. That says it's very happy now and it seems Kate is glad it still works.
Radiowise from home I have managed to make a couple of contacts over the pond on 15m all despite none too good descriptions of ionospheric conditions, or that there's a building blocking my antenna's view of the western horizon. On the Tuesday after Christmas I did spend a few hours up at the farm, with the two new M6 licence holders that passed a few weeks ago, and listened in to a three way QSO between VE (Canada), VK (Australia) and GM (Scotland). The VK was a very good 5&9, the VE 5&9+10dB and the GM audible but not registering. Guess we must have heard his signal coming all the way round. So we can say conditions are getting better.
Last night on BBC2 on their Stargazing Live program mentioned the possible effect of a CME on the power grid. Guess they'd read this blog. However they failed to mention that the Sun is very well observed in this respect, and the few hours warning we would have means that although some people may have the lights off for a couple of hours whilst they isolate the long links of the grid to reduce the inductive effects, it would not produce a lot of damage. The lines in the UK are not really long enough in this respect, but in other countries where the generation is several hundred miles away this is a possible issue. We know of course that after such an event, we'll most likely to be working the world on 6m of course.
2011's calendar is already filling up, and even this weekend we might activate G/NP-010 for SOTA on 2m even possibly on SSB.
