Getting on the air

 Santa Ham image for the day:

I had a Dr. appointment at 4:00 PM, so I had to leave work early. It was the for the last injection of a series of four over two years as part of my treatment. In turn, i got home early and was able to make dinner for the family, after which I headed down to the shack for a bit.

I tuned to 80 Meters and heard John K3WWP calling CQ. He was weak - only about 339, but I decided to give him a call, anyway. It took a while of repeats and all, but I got a 229 report from him. That made me wonder if somehow the Nor'Easter we had yesterday had affected my antennas.

I moved in frequency a bit and called CQ hoping for a QSO, but also wanting to see how the Reverse Beacon Network would find me. To my relief, I was being spotted with some pretty decent signal strengths for a 5 Watt signal. I guess the path between South Plainfield and Kitanning just wasn't open last night.

My CQ was answered by Neal WD4LSS in Arcadia, NC and we had a bit of a 599 (both ways) ragchew for about 15 to 20 minutes. Neal is an SKCC'er and was hunting numbers, I guess. This surprised me a little bit as SKCC'ers generally stick around 3.550 MHz and I was up a bit in QRP territory. Nevertheless, we had a pleasant QSO and I might have surprised Neil with my SKCC # of 49C.  I don't hand it out all that often, and I'm not even sure how many of us early members are still around. The QSO came to a kind of abrupt halt when an Olivia or some other musical type digital signal erupted on our frequency, causing us both to not hear each other anymore.

Before shutting down for the evening, I fired up the POTA spotting page and was surprised to see not a single activation on any band. That's a rarity, indeed! Tonight is the South Plainfield ARES/RACES Net on VHF at 7:00 PM and a few hours later will be the 40 Meter Fox Hunt, if I have enough energy to stay up that late.

I saw a meme on Facebook the other day which kind of hit close to home. It said, "9:00 PM is the new Midnight." I can agree with that, at times!

72 de Larry W2LJ

QRP - When you care to send the very least!