
Continuing my "Funny Animals" theme I thought I would choose this wide-eyed and hyper-looking squirrel for today's blog!
We had a nice club net on 2 meters last night and got talking about photo-editing software and eQSL Awards. I have just qualified for The eDX Award awarded by eQSL for having worked at least 25 different countries confirmed by eQSL card. It sounds easy, but there are a couple of rules that make the award slightly harder to achieve: the worked stations must be a Bronze or Silver member (qualifying by having made a minimum donation to eQSL of the necessary amount) and be "Authenticity Guaranteed" (in other words, they must have sent in a scan of their licence document), or else they must be a Gold member.
The next award issued by eQSL is for having worked 100 stations. There is nothing inbetween. I have asked eQSL a couple of times whether one can re-apply for the eDX award when one has worked, say, 50 countries or 75 countries, but I have yet to receive an answer from them. So I was wondering whether the certificate issued for 25 countries in "GIF" format could be ammended to show the new number of stations achieved and simply re-printed, rather than re-applying for the award on eQSL (which might not be possible).
My current certificate looks like this:

Anyway that's enough from me for today. I am taking Bradley to Dawlish to have a run on the beach today. After that I shall pop into the "Open Door" - this is a coffee morning held in "Wesley's" Cafe in the local Methodist Church there where, for 50p, you can get a nice hot cup of tea and a few biscuits. As the forecast is so good and it was warm enough to eat lunch outside in the garden yesterday, I have been brave enough to pack a picnic!
Finally, when I was choosing which HF transceiver to go for before finally settling on the Icom 703, on my wish list had been the FT450 which Paul (PC4T) is collecting for his QRP shack today. I shall be genuinely interested to hear how Paul gets along with it in the next few days and weeks. The 450 is a cracking radio and has IF DSP technology which I was eager to try out. Also on Paul's blog Andre commented that it is excellent for dealing with high noise floors, hearing signals his FT817 couldn't pull out of the noise. Good luck Paul. Enjoy your day collecting & setting up this smashing radio, and don't forget to tell us all about it.



