I’ve had an interesting day on the radio. I’ve not had much time for operating for a few days as I’ve been working on building a mag loop but today put that project away and decided to play.
Propagation on the higher bands wasn’t exactly super, but about lunch time I managed to work Jenny SM5MEK on 17m 599 both ways as well as a few other QRP stations in Europe. Then about 1443 worked the boss – IZ5ZCO on 15m though only 339.
Grey line here is about 1600z so I turned the beam to NA and started calling CQ on 21.060. I found the Reverse Beacon reports reassuring as I wasn’t getting much response to my calls but there were plenty of spots at good signal to noise ratios so I knew my signal was audible. At 1620 I heard a weak slightly warbling signal that I eventually copied as F5IN so I turned the beam south only to find the warble and flutter got worse due to weakening the back scatter signal and combining that with the much weaker direct path one.
The final surprise of the day was an extremely weak call – I could make out bits though not enough to resolve it fully. My best guess was a N5 ?? A ???W or a W5?? N? I sent my apologies “sri too weak” and went back to calling CQ. Five minutes later I was nearly knocked off my chair by a 599 call from N5AW. He’d been calling first with QRP 4Watts into a vertical but now was calling with 100W into a beam.
What really amused and interested me was that his first call came from Colorado and his second call from Texas and the calls were only a few minutes apart!
His QRZ page is well worth a look.
