K5D

Hooray! I worked the DXpedition today!

I got home from Church and saw an announcement by WB3AAL on one of the QRP reflectors that the K5D team was indeed on 30 Meters. He worked them at 1538 UTC.

Even though it was almost three hours later, I decided to say, "What the heck"; and I headed down to the shack and fired up the K2 and switched to the HF9V vertical. K5D was coming into NJ at 599; but I had a bit of a problem. The op was working a lot of Europeans; and propagation was such that I couldn't hear the Europeans answer. Thus, I didn't have a good idea as to how high he was listening. I flipped the K2's "B" VFO up two and kept my fingers crossed; and was lucky enough to grab them on my second call at 1825 UTC.

During my weekly conversation with Bob W3BBO yesterday; he informed me that according to the K5D Website, the CW side of the operation was sitting this weekend out because of the ARRL DX Contest. I told Bob that while I certainly respected their decision to not contest, I couldn't understand why they wouldn't then just operate on 30 and 17 Meters for the weekend, where no contesting is allowed.

We must have been on the same brain wavelength then; because they were on 30 Meters today; and I nabbed 'em! Thanks, K5D team! I think this was an excellent decision., as it gave us "non-serious" contesters and us QRPers a chance to get you without the heavy "normal" pileups!

73 de Larry W2LJ