Saturday, February 9, 2013

Snow day = radio time!!

Working the KX3
OQ5A setup
On Friday I was able to take the opportunity to get some well deserved radio time in. Most weeknights when I get in from work and get the "house stuff" done I find I'm just to tired for the rig. On Friday I was able to fire up the KX3 and try my hand at some QRPp operationing. I was scanning up and down 20m's and found OQ5A from Belgium calling CQ. I adjusted the KX3 to 100mW's of power and gave OQ5A a go, he came back to me and with just a few repeats all the contact info was passed along and the QSO is in the books. This contact  at 100mW's netted me a distance of  37,603 miles per watt. 
I emailed Greet to let him in on some of the station info at this end. He was surprised I was only using 100mW's of power into an attic dipole to boot. Now here is the funny thing about propagation with 100mW's I tried to contact K0DNG in Kansas City Missouri and it was a huge struggle. I was going to up the power but Dennis was sending his 73s to me and moving on to calling CQ again.


Finally I saw on my Maclogger's cluster a spot for W0RW/PM now the cluster showed this to be in Indonesia. He was very weak and kinda in and out and there were other station trying to contact him as well. I topped up the KX3 to the 5 watt level and gave him a go. He came back to me and gave me a respectable report.  Now I thought there was something fishy about this cluster spot showing it as an Indonesian contact. I tripped off to QRZ.com and found out that PM stood for (in this case) pedestrian mobile!!  Paul was in Colorado which is a not even close to Indonesia...(this is my high school geography shinning through) but it was great making contact as I have read on many blogs about Paul and his pedestrian mobile adventures. 

4 comments:

Jspiker said...

Hello Mike,

Unbelievable! What a great contact into Belgium with 100 MW. You've got a great antenna there in the attic. Maybe I should do the same?

And always good to work W0RW in Colorado. He's one of my favorite catches also. Great job !!

PE4BAS, Bas said...

Hello Mike, you did a great job again. It's amazing what can be done with a piece of wire and less power. I also like to lookup the QRZ pages of stations I worked or hear. Sometimes there is a bit more info about the station. 73, Bas

VE9KK said...

Good evening John, I have been very pleased with the antenna and it's great to have it in the attic no weather to worry about or connections going bad. It was great to finally contact W0RW as I have read many blogs who had contacted him.
Have a nice week John
Mike

VE9KK said...

Good evening Bas, it's nice to see either the setup of the op you (or both) have contacted and I find that QRZ is one of the ways you can do that.
Have a nice week Bas
Mike