Radio active night

I don't know what the heck was going on last night, but boy-howdy, was there a lot of traffic on the way home from work last night! My normal commute home from the western side of the state to South Plainfield is just under an hour. Last night's commute was 90 minutes with a sea of red tail lights in front of me as far as the eye could see. I didn't pass any accidents or emergency construction, so I have no idea as to the "why". My son Joseph reported the same thing on his commute from the northern part of the state to home. Lots and lots of cars, and lots and lots of sitting and staring at red tail lights. We both could have used Moses to part this kind of "red sea" but I guess he was busy helping others.

A night at the radio proved to be a remedy for that debacle. After dinner, I headed down to the shack to check into the NNJ Southern District ARES Net. The Southern District includes Middlesex, Somerset, Monmouth and Union counties. When that was over, the entire NNJ Section ARES Net was held on a different repeater.  But there was some time to kill between ARES nets before that started, so I turned my attention to the KX3. I managed to work a POTA activation, and them I saw that W1AW/KL7 was spotted on 15 Meters. I dialed on over and discovered to my delight that they were pretty loud on the HF9V - 579 peaking to 599. I haven't worked Alaska in a long time, so I decided to give it a whirl. I had to wait for the pileup to dwindle a little, but my 5 Watts made it through! Ya gotta love it when the sunspot cycle is good to you!

At 9:00 PM EST (0200 UTC) the 40 Meters QRP Fox Hunt was starting up. Starting at 7.030 MHz and still on the HF9V, I very slowly twiddled the dial searching for the Lower Fox. At first I wasn't hearing the Fox himself, but I did hear some familiar call signs which indicated to me that I had stumbled upon the pack of chasing Hounds. I backed down about 1 KHz and sure enough, there was Earl N8SS firing off CW from his fingertips at a prodigious rate. The problem was QSB - I would hear Earl only very faintly and then he would disappear, only to come back after a bit. I listened for a while and hoped that propagation would improve after a while, so I went to go find the Upper Fox.

That duty fell to Steve WX2S for the evening. Steve lives all of about 25 miles, +/- a few, from me down in Kingston, NJ which is right next to Princeton. Would there be enough 40 Meters groundwave to allow us to QSO? I found Steve easily enough, but I knew my signal to him was going to be weak, even by QRP standards. I listened for a while and even threw out my call sign a few times with no joy, so I decided to descend back down the band to see if Earl's signal had gotten any louder.

In fact, it did ......... but there was a loud station almost on top of him which was making it extremely hard to hear Earl. I had to tighten up the KX3's filters almost to the maximum of tightness in order to block out the offending RF, but they did their job and I was finally able to hear Earl well enough to be able to hear any reply back to me. Earl, who was 559, finally answered my call to him at 0241 UTC and we completed the exchange.

Now it was back to the Upper Woods to see if ground wave to Steve was going to be enough. Steve didn't get any louder, but he was in the clear and was Q5 copy, so I started throwing out my call. His pileup was slackening off as he was calling "CQ Fox" multiple times in a row. I kept on throwing out my call with my right hand on the paddles and the fingers of my left hand crossed. That must have counted for something as at 0248 UTC, RF made it from South Plainfield to Kingston and visa-versa and we completed the exchange.  Six for six so far this season! That's not going to last and I probably just jinxed the heck out of it.

Hats off and kudos to both Steve WX2S, Earl N8SS and whoever was behind the key last night at W1AW/KL7 last night. All three ops have tremendous ears and it made for quite the delightful QRP night. I love it when 5 Watts does the job!

72 de Larry W2LJ

QRP - When you care to send the very least!