Boy, I haven't been on the air at nights for only about a week during the Mets run through the playoffs. It felt good to get back on again! Both 40 Meters and 80 Meters seemed to be in good shape, though it was hard to tell on 40 Meters. Another RTTY contest is running this weekend; and there were wall to wall RTTY signals almost all the way down to the Extra class CW subsband.
I did manage to work Dan KB6NU for a bit right in the vicinity of 7.030 MHz. It's always good to hook up with Dan for a QSO. This time we spent a little time talking about the World Series. Dan lives in Michigan and the 2006 World Series starts tomorrow night in Detroit. Then we reminisced a bit about the last St. Louis - Detroit World Series in 1968. That was also the year that Denny McClain won 30 games for the Tigers.
After signing with Dan, I popped on over to 80 Meters and heard John Shannon calling CQ as N3A. The NAQCC is running a special event celebrating the 1st year anniversary of the club by running the callsign N3A. If you get a chance, please work N3A, by all means. I might get lucky enough to use the callsign myself later this week.
Lastly I worked Greg W2YYS up in the SKCC area of 80 Meters (translate: on or around 3.720 MHZ in the Novice subband). Greg and I have worked before; about a year and a half ago. We exchanged SKCC numbers and a quick search in Win-EQF revealed that Greg was my 71st SKCC QSO. So, I'm not too far from becoming an SKCC Centurion! I'll have to keep visiting that are of the band, often. I started out using my Vibroplex Original; but switched over to my Nye Speed-X straight key in order to give Greg my SKCC number. I'm still kind of sloppy in sending "4"s via the bug. So there would be no confusion, I switched over to the straight key. Greg was using a straight key that he's had since 1948.
Another neat thing is that Greg lives on Cape Cod, not too far from Wellfleet. Wellfleet is where Marconi had an experimental wireless station setup in his efforts to send a radio signal across the Atlantic. The site is now a National Historical Site, run by the National Park Service. The station ruins are right on the sand dunes, real close to the sea. You can stand on the shore and look out over the ocean and just close your eyes and imagine your HF signal jumping off your antenna to span the briney vastness on it's way around the world. Cool stuff!
73 de Larry W2LJ
No comments:
Post a Comment