A site about the radio listening hobby and my activities therein - longwave, mediumwave, shortwave, FM, and television DXing. A site about the radio listening hobby in all its forms, or at least the forms that interest me.

I am also a licenced amateur radio operator, callsign VE3LXL. Information about my amateur radio station is found on my station website.

Monday 15 November 2010

70 cm Repeater VE3VOP

Ok, this isn't DX. But for me part of the DXing hobby is about exploring the radio spectrum to see what's there, and about exploring new aspects of DXing. Since I've spent very little time on the UHF band, and very little on the 70 cm amateur band (440 MHz), anything I hear there is new. I spent a bit of time listening to the 70 cm band today (Nov. 15) and I heard some talk in an unknown language on 443.325 MHz. I didn't catch the callsigns of the stations, but at one point I heard a Morse code ID. The hams I heard were talking on a repeater, and the Morse code ID was the repeater's automated ID. This was VE3VOP, the repeater of the Mabuhay Amateur Radio Club. Time was 00:23 UTC. It's a local repeater, located here in Toronto. Signal was excellent, as you'd expect from a local.

Catching a local repeater isn't much of an achievement. But it does show that hunting for amateur radio repeaters is another possible facet of DXing. There are unusual propagation conditions that allow VHF and UHF signals to travel long distances, so this could be another niche of DXing.

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