The magic of 10 meters.............

Almost broke my all time QRPp record with this one

On Friday I had great plan of getting on the radio this weekend,  Friday came and  it was just not happening on the bands  it was dead at VE3WDM so nothing was logged. On Saturday Julie and I had a wedding to go to and it was my plan,  when we got home to give the bands a shot. Well it turned out that we did not get home until after 2am so ham radio for sure was out. The weekend was slowly running out with it now being Sunday. I promised my son I would pick him up and we would go to Starbucks for coffee and conversation. Ben and I try to get together each weekend for some time together. He is an amazing chef (time for dad to brag now) at a very high end restaurant he is number 2 in command so arranging time together can be a challenge. BUT when we go to his place for dinner it's out of this world!!! Anyway back to ham radio.....I arrive back home and all I have to do was put away the groceries from shopping and make my lunch for Monday. Murphy had a big smile on his face as I washed some lettuce for lunches.........the water in the sink was not going ANYWHERE!!!! The plumbing from the kitchen was clogged, so much for ham radio time it was time to deal with this. I do have a thing for having the RIGHT tools for the job and I purchased some time ago an electric driven drain snake...HA HA Murphy put that in your pipe and smoke it!!!! I ran that puppy through the drain and in 15 minutes all was well.....except for Murphy he was not smiling
anymore..

500mW contact

It was now time for RADIO..........not so much......my wife was "REALLY WANTING" a latte along with the Banting of her eyes I was off to grant  this last "favor". NOW it was radio time so I turned on the rig along with DXLab software (which is great by the way) and low and behold 10 meters was hopping. There
was no new DXCC's for me to be had but lots of DX. It was 2pm in the afternoon local time and that was very odd for 10 meters to be this active but heck who is arguing. It seems I had a direct line to Spain, sure there was Germany and other European countries but they had huge pileup's waiting for a contact. It seemed to workout that I would fall upon Spanish stations calling CQ and it would work out that they were just waiting for me to come back to them. I made four contacts with as little power as possible. Since I worked  stations with the minimum power it tends to drag out contacts as I start with 100mW"s or less and work my way up from there.

Summary of stations worked on 10 meters 

EA4TX          500Mw's          7645 miles per watt

EA1DR          500Mw's          7380 miles per watt

EA7TG          100Mw's         39,404 miles per watt. ( close to my record of 45,868)

EA5BY              3 watts          1316  miles per watt. The band was starting to close time for QRO...   :)

500mW contact.

The band opening lasted for about 2 hours and it may not seem like many contacts for that amount of time but I am thrilled with the power output into an attic dipole at about 30 feet. The antenna is surrounded by insulation and wood but is able to rock to Spain with as little as 100mW's!!!  While we are on the subject of "rock" I have to admit this post took some time to compose. While putting the all words together I had my headphones on listening to Live 365 metal rock radio on the internet. Confession time........I am a die hard 52 year old "metal head" so the post was jelled with Rage against the machine, Black Sabbath, AC/DC Godsmack and black label society. Between keyboarding and air guitaring it took just a little longer and even more time to edit. 

HAM RADIO ON!!!