Friday, August 24, 2012

Strange

Lots of yard work today.  As a reward, I put some time in behind the key tonight.  All the bands seemed to have a lot of background noise tonight for some reason. Last night, while listening on 20 Meters during the QRP Fox hunt, the background noise was almost non-existent.

Anyway, I worked OK1DX on 30 Meters at 10.120 MHz. He was calling "CQ DX" and wasn't getting any takers. So I threw my call out there and got an immediate response.  Pavel was 579 here and I got a 559 in return.  No surprise there.  The QSO was a bit more than your normal run of the mill DX QSO; and by the end, Pavel had told me that I had also come up to 579.

Here's the kicker.  I was running 5 Watts to my 88' EDZ antenna.  He was pushing 400 Watts into a dipole. My first inclination at learning he was pushing 400 Watts, was to wonder why he was only 579 here. I would have thought at that power he would have been 599+.

Of course, there are reasons for that, I know. But sometimes, even as a QRPer, I fall into that "more power equals louder" trap myself.

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

2 comments:

  1. Nice catch Larry! An 88' EDZ was a standby for me for a long time, it's a great all-purpose antenna and killer on 20 meters.

    73!

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  2. I had these expereinces myself as well Larry. Last winter I had a QSO with a Danish station on 80m. He was using 1KW on a dipole (I think a G5RV) and was peaking just S9 not the loudest on frequency. I was using 5W with my FT817 and peaking S9+30dB over at him. My antenna a 84m horizontal loop. 73, Bas

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