Disappointment, again.

I swept the bands a few times yesterday and I could not locate any more museum ships that were on the air. In retrospect, what I should have done, and will do next year is to place a bunch of appropriate call signs in Ham Alert. I had NJ2BB in there, but band conditions were never good enough for propagation between South Plainfield and Camden. The distance between us is only 78 miles. I tried listening for them when they were spotted on 40 Meters, but even then, there was no groundwave propagation. 80 Meters would have been my best bet, but I doubt they have access to space for an 80 Meter antenna. I also kept looking at DX Summit and some of the other clusters, but I never saw anything in comments to indicate whether or not the spotted station was a museum ship or not.

The other disappointment for the weekend was the 4 States Second Sunday Sprint. I worked exactly one station and that was Mark WB9HFK, who had a terrific signal into NJ.  I also heard Chas W2SH on 20 Meters, but he was very weak. I tried calling him several times with no luck.

I called "CQ 4S QRP" a lot, with no success on both 20 and 40 Meters. On 40 Meters, I tried the 7.030, 7.040 and 7.120 MHz neighborhoods. Nada, zip zilch. In situations, like these, as unlikely as it would have been, I tend to thing maybe there's something wrong with my antennas. Afterwards, I plugged my call sign into the Reverse Beacon Network to see if I was being heard. This is what came up:

And for the most part, I was getting double digit dB numbers above the signal to noise ratio level, so I was not only being heard by the skimmers, but would have been audible to the human ear, as well. Even some of the skimmers in Europe were hearing me in double digit dB figures. That made sense to be as I had had that QSO with England just the day before on 17 Meters at only 5 Watts.

The timing for the Second Sunday Sprint is not ideal as that's the same time the weekly K1USN Slow Speed Sprint also occurs.  All you hear on 40 Meters is wall-to-wall "CQ SST". I may try another time or two before I decide whether or not it's worth attempting to participate at all.

72 de Larry W2LJ

QRP - When you care to send the very least!