Sam, I clearly see your point. Perhaps I can volunteer some specifics from my own QRP station. I live in a townhouse in NY state opposite a 1500 foot mountain a half mile away and I'm about 200 feet MSL. My antenna is an East/West 44' nonresonant doublet in my attic which loads up on 80 through 6 through an SGC-237 autocoupler. However, I presently choose to only work 40, 30, and 20. I built and use all the Elecraft transceivers. I generally use only 5 watts and I only operate CW. I am a QRP fanatic. I've worked 83 countries on 5 watts or less and nearly all states with this antenna and my K2 and K3 within the last year. I'm a ragchewer, not a paper-chaser so these numbers do not represent any kind of concentrated effort. My other antennas are equally non-awe-inspiring. A 28 foot wire thrown into a tree, with a 33' counterpoise on the ground, regularly gets my K1 signal into Europe and South America from my back deck with 559 average reports. A homemade magnetic loop sitting in my driveway and 900 milliwatts out of my KX1 got to UA1CE in St. Petersburgh on two different occasions. That's better than 5000 miles per watt.
QRP is responsible for bringing me back into ham radio. I left the hobby for many years after becoming rather bored with how easy it was to push the button, aim the tribander on the tower attached to the side of my house, toss my 180 watts into the ether and get a reply 99% of the time. For me, QRP became one of those niche areas in ham radio referred to by another lister. Every contact is a 'big deal' and when I reach for the power knob on my rig its usually to turn it *down* even further just to see how low I can go. I've been milliwatting recently. I also go CW mobile on 40, 30, and 20 with hamsticks. In the end, it all comes down to the gods of propagation. But even then, I've called CQ on a "dead band" more than once and received a surprising reply around 14.060. Anyway, for what it's worth..... 73, Stan WB2LQF KX1 #2411 K1#2994 K2# 6980 K3#5244 K9 #1 (Cocoa the Chihuahua) Everything is QRP, even the dog. On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 8:41 AM, Sam Morgan wrote: > All these QRP/QRO contacts stories, > are pretty meaningless to me, > *UNLESS* > they have antenna, band, and qth information included. > ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
