Whoa!

I'm sitting on 3.560 MHz listening for 80 Meter QRPers and all of a sudden an ear splitting tone comes on frequency.  Then I hear some SSB, weakly in the background.  I quickly changed the K2 over to LSB and I hear KB2H calling "CQ 75 Meters".  Wow - that can't be right!  According to QRZ, Lou lives on the North shore of Long Island, so he's not that far away from me. Must be something wrong with his rig somewhere? Maybe he doesn't realize the split button is on? (I've done that !!!!)  I looked him up on QRZ looking for an e-mail, so I could let him know that he's coming in quite clearly in the CW portion of the band; but none was listed.  This would have been a good time to have a rig that could do SSB. If anyone reading this knows him - I think it would be a good idea to let him know that he's generating some signal all the way down in the CW portion of the band.

I stopped on the way home from work at the electronics store and picked up the two components that I needed.  I soldered them in and was able to do the "Stage 1" smoke test on my NE QRP Nescaf filter.  Upon hooking up my 12V SLA, nothing blew up, so that was a good sign.  All the voltages at all the listed check points were spot on, so I guess I can proceed to the next stage, building the Audio Amplifier stage.

Two nice QSOs tonight. One with Ken WA8REI on 40 Meters. His signal was blasting into New Jersey again courtesy of his Yagi antenna.  I think Ken is going to be spoiled by the beam and might not want to go back to plain ol' vanilla wires after too much longer.  It's a good thing our QSO ended when it did, though, because not more than 5 minutes later, the over S9 local QRN reared its ugly head.

I switched down to 80 Meters and had a nice 2X QRP QSO with Craig N4PLK at the 80 Meter watering hole.  After the QSO with Craig, I've just been monitoring, and that's when I began to hear KB2H call CQ. And from what I can make out, Lou is in QSO with a W4 station, so I think the spur, or whatever it is being generated way down here may be quite unknown to him.  Wish there was a way I could let him know.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP - When you care to send the very least!