Thursday, September 20, 2007
Hacking my way through the "Get Your Feet Wet" "contest" I got to experience my first inbound CW pile up.
Folks were being very relaxed about who owned a frequency but I finished one contact and then heard...
... Well... A mess. Seemed like a constant single pitched tone for a couple of seconds, then some brief space and it started up again. Clearly not QRM or a tune-upper, but...
Then, after about 3-4 seconds it hit me... "Oh, so that's what two or more stations *exactly* zero beat sounds like!!!"
So, after that blinding flash of the obvious I waited another second or so until there was enough spacing to grab a couple of characters, "??BZ/E de AE6RF/N KN" and got on with my life.
The same thing happened at the end of my third QSO. By the end of the third people had wandered off.
Pretty cool, eh?
Folks were being very relaxed about who owned a frequency but I finished one contact and then heard...
... Well... A mess. Seemed like a constant single pitched tone for a couple of seconds, then some brief space and it started up again. Clearly not QRM or a tune-upper, but...
Then, after about 3-4 seconds it hit me... "Oh, so that's what two or more stations *exactly* zero beat sounds like!!!"
So, after that blinding flash of the obvious I waited another second or so until there was enough spacing to grab a couple of characters, "??BZ/E de AE6RF/N KN" and got on with my life.
The same thing happened at the end of my third QSO. By the end of the third people had wandered off.
Pretty cool, eh?
