Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Worked a QRP Celebrity

I spent a good portion of lunchtime trying to bust the pileup for T46X on 17 Meters.


No dice today, and that's a bit disappointing. Usually, NJ to Cuba is "easy-peasey-lemon-squeezey", but there's 8 days left to work them.  Maybe I'll have better luck from home with the "big antennas".

After T46X signed QRT, I still had some time to kill, so I went on down the road to the 20 Meter QRP Watering Hole environs. There I heard K7TQ calling CQ.  Randy K7TQ and I have worked many, many times before in the various QRP Sprints. Over the years, it's never been more than that, though, so I jumped at the opportunity.


We were both 449 and fighting QSB, so it wasn't a bona fide ragchew, but it was pleasant and (very) cool, nonetheless. Randy was working with 1 Watt to a Yagi at the 60' (18 Meters) level. We had good enough conditions to exchange weather reports and for Randy to tell me how he participated in the Salmon Run last weekend as a mobile station.

Randy Foltz K7TQ is one of the what I-consider-to-be "QRP Celebrities".  He is extremely well known throughout the QRP community and he appears in just about every QRP Sprint and contest that there is.  It was a pleasure to exchange a little bit more than the usual "559 ID 5W / 559 NJ 5W".  K7TQ is one of those iconic call signs that just about every active QRPer recognizes right away.

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


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