3G0YA in the log

But not without some drama.

I had to turn off HamAlert until I got home from work yesterday. It was going off so frequently that it was driving me nuts! I also got a few stares from people who heard Morse Code originating from my pocket! But in the back of my mind, that gave me hope, as I was pretty sure I'd work them sometime yesterday.

I arrived home and had dinner and then turned HamAlert back on and my phone started chirping immediately! They were spotted on two frequencies 24.896 MHz on 12 Meters and 14.025 MHz on 20 Meters. I decided to try 12 Meters first and was rewarded with a loud signal. I mean like sitting-across-the-room-from-me-with-a-code-practice-oscillator loud! The op announced he was listening up, so I set up the KX3 for split operation and set the transmit frequency up 1 kHz, and decided to try with the W3EDP.

Got him on the first try! And that's when it happened! That's when I noticed, to my horror of horrors, that I hadn't turned down the KXPA100 from 85 Watts after the St. Max Net was over on Sunday evening.  I had just worked Easter Island with 85 Watts!

What's a QRPer to do? I decided to try going over to 20 Meters and give a listen and the signal coming from the DXpedition was nowhere near as loud on 20 Meters as it was on 12 Meters. That was when I decided to go back to 12 Meters and give it another shot, this time at 5 Watts.  I called again and they came back to me again fairly quickly. This time however, I sent a "599 NJ QRP TU" as my part of the exchange. I don't know if that matters or not, but when they see my callsign on the same band twice, maybe a note will have been made that the second QSO was a QRP contact. That's the one I'm going to reference for a QSL card.

A bit later, my friend Marv K2VHW, sent me a message that 3G0YA had gotten louder on 20 Meters. I went back to 14.025 MHz and the pileup was much more fierce than on 12 Meters. Heck, there basically was no pileup on 12 Meters! At times they would call CQ and they remained listening at 1 kHz up.  On 20 Meters, the op was running a race track pattern, moving up a bit after each QSO until he got to about 4 kHz up and then he would work his way down again. I had to pump up the KXPA100 and when he finally heard me, I got "W2L??" three times before he finally copied my call correctly.

12 Meters was like shooting fish in a barrel. 20 Meters was more like being in the middle of the pack during a fishing derby.

Anyway, I got them in the log and now I have to figure out what their QSL procedure is. (I went to ClubLog - found my QSOs and paid the proper $$$ for the QSL cards.)

72 de Larry W2LJ

QRP - When you care to send the very least!