I snagged a couple new countries in my quest for DXCC Honor Roll in the last few weeks/month. OYØ (Faroe Island), 9Q (Democratic Republic of Congo), SV9 (Crete), EK (Armenia), 8Q (Maldives), FO (Austral Island) and finally FO (Marquesas Island). I’ve probably worked a few of these DXCC countries several times over through the years, but I never received a QSL so we’ll just keep working until we confirm them, then we’ll keep working them well after too! That’s the fun of chasing DX and the the heartbreak of losing my old hard drive where I had thousands and thousands of contacts logged, but not backed up. Oh well, I still have all my QSL cards…

With these 7, that brings my total DXCC Countries worked to 300 with 293 confirmed. Only 38 more to go.

At this rate it may take me another 35 years to get them all!

In other news, I’ve really been having a rough time with line noise “interference”. Between the neighbors Christmas light displays, low sunspot numbers and a constantly freezing/thawing power transformer out back, it’s been making it tougher than usual to hear DX. And if you can’t hear DX, you can’t work DX.

I bought a MFJ 1026 Noise Canceling Signal Enhancer on eBay to assist with the noise and I have to say, once I figured it out (then got lucky with a noise antenna), it has helped tremendously. I was just about ready to give up on the damn thing, then I got lucky.

The principle behind the noise canceler is to hear the “noise” on a secondary antenna, then the unit can place the noise 180 degrees out of phase from the main receiving antenna – thus cancelling the noise but not the signals being received. The problem I was having with it was I couldn’t get a secondary receive antenna to “hear” the noise. It can’t cancel something it can’t hear. I tried UHF/VHF TV antennas, wires wrapped around the shack, the whip that’s supplied with the 1026 and even a couple lame-ass attempts at building an “indoor” directional noise antenna from coat hangers and odds & ends I had laying around the shack – no luck. I was just about to package the damn thing up and send it back – that’s when I got lucky.

I had a 144 MHZ BNC rubber duck whip laying around that hadn’t been used in 20 years that I wanted to try on the noise, but I didn’t have a way to connect it to the MFJ 1026 RCA or 239 coax connectors so I stopped in at a local Radio Shack and was checking out the BNC to coax adapters when I saw a $20 telescoping whip antenna with a BNC connector on it. Hmmmm. I figured I’d try the rubber duck first then as a last resort, try the 27 MHZ adjustable whip. I threw it in my bag with the adapters and bee-lined it home.

I never got to try the rubber whip. I installed the pre-amp jumper in the MFJ 1026 to the external antenna position, plugged the 27 MHZ telescoping antenna in, raised it and there it was – line noise on the secondary receive antenna! After a couple of “learning” passes on how to null the noise, it works perfectly. S-7 line noise completely wiped out without affecting the DX signals. Magic.

Anyway, enough rambling for now. I’m hungry.

I’ll post a couple .wav files soon with actual results of the noise canceller at work. It is amazing once you figure it out, and it’s much better than the noise “blanker” on the FT-990 because it doesn’t distort/overload or drag in loud signals close by.

More to come, 73 for now

NØUN

ADDED 12/27/2010: Here’s an audio file with the MFJ-1026 at work. To clarify; that’s me turning the 1026 ON and OFF during the recording. The line noise was a solid S5 throughout the entire recording and was only canceled when I engaged the 1026.

MFJ 1026 Removing Line Noise