Announcing yourself

If you're taking some time off from work; or deviating from your daily routine (if you're retired), to go out into the Great Outdoors to do some QRPing, it's always nice to make some contacts while you're out there.

We have a great resource at our disposal to help facilitate this.

http://www.qrpspots.com/

If you know you are going to be QRP portable, post yourself! Give an ETA of when you will be QRV and on what frequencies. It certainly can't hurt! It's definitely another way to go in addition of posting your plans to the QRP e-mail reflectors.

There's nothing more frustrating than taking the trouble to set up a portable station only to be greeted by dead silence on the bands. By using the wonderful resources we have at our disposal, we can have a ton of fun in the process.

BTW, I was amazed at the number of responses that my post about Twitter received. I think it was one of the briefest blog posts I have ever made; but yet got a relatively high amount of responses - mostly negative. Instead of being turned off by Twitter; how about possibly making it into a tool that we QRPers could use to our advantage? Twitter could be another venue where you can post your portable ops intentions. If enough other QRPers are "following" you - maybe that will help get the word out about your portable activities.

I remember just a lil' while back the Adventure Radio Society used to post "Wilderness Alerts" that QRPers could use to publicize their outings. I haven't seen any of those lately since the ARS went to the Wiki format. Maybe between QRP Spots and Twitter, we have something that can help fill the void. This way we have the opportunity to make it a tool that we can use in our favor; instead of it being just another useless Internet gadget. To be honest with you, I'd much rather receive a tweet that says, "de KB9BVN - QRV 14.060 +/- 10 at 1830 UTC from Caesar Creek Park" (for example) than some utter nonsense from someone telling me that he just bought his fifth Iphone.

73 de Larry W2LJ