Monday, February 16, 2009

Oh My!

I must profess a certain amount of naivete' when it comes to DX pileups. I am certainly not a big gun DXer although I am not afraid to jump into the fray.

Today while testing the futile K5D waters, I heard behavior that I had never witnessed before in a CW pileup. It was behavior that I've witnessed in SSB pileups in years past; but never in a CW pileup before.

One Ham was calling on K5D's transmit frequency, so inevitably the "pileup managers" all started sending "UP" "UP". This must have frustrated the guy or gotten him angry for some reason, so he replied by sending, slowly and deliberately, "FU" "FU".

Has it come to this?

73 de Larry W2LJ

4 comments:

  1. Are you sure it was the same guy? In CW it's fairly easily to zero beat with someone and impersonate them. And there could have been other people annoyed by the kilocycle cops.

    While a lot of folks like to think CW operators are more gentlemanly, I've often thought that you don't hear profanity-laden bad behavior on CW like you do on phone because it's just more difficult to send long rants and gain an audience on CW.

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  2. pileup behavior is why I made all of about 5 QSOs last year. Don't want to deal with it. Totally losing interest

    73 de KG2V

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  3. I wonder if the FU was aimed at the pileup managers, or K5D out of frustration at not being heard.

    I sometimes wonder if the stations that call on the DXpedition's TX frequency can actually hear them. If they could, maybe they'd realise what they're doing wrong.

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  4. Anonymous3:20 PM

    I nearly threw my cans off the other day with more than one clueless OM tuned up directly, with perfect zero-beat frequency, right where K5D was. And not the little trim up type signal but a long, drawn out, squeeze every db from the the old dipole and every watt from the amp tune-up. I'll take my chances on the second half and hope for the best. Hopefully all of the big guns will have their Q plus back-up Q plus just in case Q in the log by then. Wild.

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