It was a wonderful grayline evening, ensconced in my console chair, as I sipped the fine vintage of twilight propagation on HF. A familiar little group of us was merrily engaged in a continent-spanning QSO on 17m. After my turn at the mic in this pleasant little SSB roundtable, I tweaked the gain up a little as one of the low power ops continued his feeble transmission.
Suddenly...a giant tyrannosaurus of a signal, with the kind of speech processing that rivals a NASA moon mission, excitedly launches his callsign into the ether only one kilohertz away. A sinking feeling covers us like a shroud; that sinking feeling---like the fog clearing around your little sailboat as you glimpse up at the bow of the Exxon Valdiz oil tanker at 50 yards steaming your way. Instinctively I bellow "the frequency is in use!" A femtosecond after my index finger leaves the PTT button, there is no doubt our fate is sealed. Two more stations howling their mating calls, above and below our little nesting frequency. "We're toast---History!" I mutter. We are witnessing the natural birth of the most magnificent HF animal in the wild: "Spectrum Maximus", the Rare-DX Split Pile-Up. Undoubtedly, the tyrannosaurus op is now parading his newfound pride on the cluster, for within moments of his "Roger 59" a slobbering herd of squawkers encircles us... eating half the tiny 18 MHz phone band for supper. It thrashes and claws, oblivious to the timid "little people" under foot. Its eyes and ears are only on the prey---a weak little voice enjoying the word "up!" to make the monster jump. We never stood a chance amidst the gaggle of raspy raptors. There wasn't even time to meekly QSY! All I could do was chuckle to myself "Resistance Is Futile, You Will Be Assimilated..." as we were gobbled up by the giant kilohertz carnivore. Bonnie KQ6XA (c)2006 Bonnie Crystal. All rights reserved. -- Need a Digital mode QSO? Connect to Telnet://cluster.dynalias.org Other areas of interest: The MixW Reflector : http://groups.yahoo.com/group/themixwgroup/ DigiPol: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Digipol (band plan policy discussion) Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digitalradio/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/digitalradio/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
