It was a tough go on the 80 Meter QRP Fox hunt tonight.
First off, I never heard TJ WØEA in Iowa at all. This was not a surprise; as Iowa is a tough haul for 80 Meters. I really wasn't expecting to hear TJ at all. What did surprise me was that I didn't hear any of his pursuing Hounds, either.
I did manage to get into Lee AA4GA's log. A QSO between Georgia and New Jersey is way more realistic for 80 Meters. But there was a ton of QRM and some pretty loud QRN which made it a bit tougher than it should have been. I got in Lee's log with 11 minutes to go - these hunts last 90 minutes. So there was 79 minutes of trying to figure out Lee's listening sequence, dealing with QRM, etc.
One thing that made it a lot easier was using the KX3 tonight and making use of the "Dual Watch" function. For those of you who don't have a KX3, this is where you use both the main receiver and the sub-receiver together. You turn on the Dual Watch function and plug in a pair of stereo headphones. The main receiver goes to one ear while the sub-receiver goes to the other ear. This makes it a breeze to find where the last successful Hound was transmitting, tune the sub-receiver there and then go to town with operating split. As long as the two frequencies do not exceed a 15 kHz split, the Dual Watch function takes a lot of the guess work out of operating split.
The W3EDP served me in good stead again tonight, getting me a "one-fer" - one out of two Fox pelts. Hey, if I was a Major Leaguer, a .500 batting average would make me a very wealthy man!
72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP - When you care to send the very least!
Larry congratulations on the hunt and yes the KX3 is a fantastic rig...have not had to much time on mine as I have been fooling around with getting my rig to work with the Mac OS.
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