Thursday, September 18, 2014

Take time to listen it pays off.

W1ZU's home setup.
I had some spare time just before dinner time and thought it would be a nice idea to sit down and relax at the radio. The rig was set to the QRP watering hole of 14.060 and very soon after I heard W1ZU calling CQ. Now having said that I just read the other evening in my CQ magazine of how important it is to listen, so I thought I would give the ears a workout and the key could sit idle. By listening I found out that W1ZU was operating from a summit in Maine, that he was activating SOTA (summits on the air) summit W1/DI 006. Not being an active SOTA chaser I did some more listening and was very surprised how fast the pileup developed to contact him. It would seem you can obtain points for contacting summits and this one was worth one point. Once the pileup settled down I threw my call out and Scott came back to me with a decent report. If I did not spend the time to listen and just tossed my call in and make the contact and move on I would never had learned the detailed info about this contact.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Mike,

I was just browsing around looking for KX1 topics and ran across my shack on your site. Thanks for the chase while I was on Beech Mtn (W1/DI-006). That is a great little hike with good views of Desert Island around Acadia National Park. I was able to take my family on that hike, which is always fun. I'm surprised you found me as I had a short operating time with the 5 y/o and 2 y/o taking up most of my attention.

I've just recently completed (at least the base radio and ATU) a KX1 to lighten my load while hiking. It won't see many trails much before late spring given the temperatures over the next few months! I noticed the Pelican case you mentioned for your KX1 and I was looking for something similar.

Anyway, thanks for the chase and I hope to work you again when I'm not on a summit and I can be more "verbose". My code is always a work in progress, so the practice does me good.

Thanks again for the chase and 73!

Scott - W1ZU

VE9KK said...

Good morning Scott, thanks for the contact and it will say that with the young ones your hands would be very busy! The KX1 is a great little radio and perfect for what you would like to use it for out on the trail. I am the same way with the code but for me I get the nerves happening and then the silly mistakes start to happen. Scott thanks for commenting and sorry I just saw your comment today as for some reason it was sent to the spam file on my blog.
Mike