Monday, July 03, 2006

 
Bob Wolbert, K6XX wrote:
> WR,
>
> Thanks for the info, and for the QSO. I hope you did well.
>
> For me, 80m was just too noisy. 40m only produced 7 QSOs. 20m was better, with
> 53.
>
> 73 de Bob, K6XX

It was the most frustrating 2 hours I've had in a very LONG time.

It didn't get to the point where I just turned off the rig and walked away, but it came close.

Chuckle. You put out a big signal on 20m. I was at the Mt Bielawsky lookout. The many over S9 signal shut down 20m so I went down to 40m. As soon as I would hear you on 40 I'd jump back up. I was sorta proud of that gambit.

This is my third one of these, and frankly... I suck at them. Between #1 and #2 I made some gear improvements and fixed some reliability things so I was able to at least operate all the way through the second one.

For the second one, it became clear that my CW operating skills simply are not up to snuff. So I practiced a whole bunch the past month and thought that I'd do better this month. Nope. Nope. Nope. Still stink-a-roo.

I wanted to search and pounce. The plan was to sit on a station until I could suss out their exchange and then make a contact. Last month I was able to sort of make that happen, but my CW skills weren't good enough and my patience wasn't up to snuff. This month things were just so chaotic, I couldn't make it work. I've got multiple pages of callsigns that I couldn't string together exchanges on, or couldn't hear me.

Anyhow. Very frustrating. Another month to work on basic operating skills.

At least I got a nice sunset out of it.

60 Qs under tonight's conditions should be top 20% or so. I don't know if you went with a light weight rig or not, but if you went with your FT-817 plus a battery and keyer that should be very competitive...

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?