Y'know, most of the DX I work is on "dead bands", usually 20 meters for me. I'll tune up and down for a few minutes hearing absolutely no one. So I find a quiet spot.
Not always, of course, but often enough that I'm no longer surprised a DX station calls me sometimes from halfway around the world, literally. And we QSO. Better, we often chew the rag. Only rag chewers seem to haunt the 'dead' bands, no matter where we live. The downside is that, after a few minutes - if we're lucky it's ten or fifteen - carriers start appearing on frequency or within a few hundred Hz. We've been spotted on the Internet. I've even had a station call me on top of the DX station's transmission asking me to stop so he could work the guy. We take the hint and QRT and I hear the pileup descend on the frequency, sigh. I take a break, glad I'm not the guy who just wanted a quiet rag chew and who once again finds himself the object of a pileup. In their favor, I must say that while "reading the mail" I've yet to hear DX station who didn't respond to the calls politely. 73, Ron AC7AC -----Original Message----- ...so there I am tuning across 20 meters and the band seems dead. Having learned a lot about self-fulfilling prophesies across my 53 year ham career, I go up to 14.060 and send one quick CQ. A tiny signal appears but the KX3 has what it takes to make the most of the situation. I manage to dig out N4KGL/6. He's about a 329; he gives me a 449. Seems Greg is sitting in a hotel room at LAX in front of his own KX3 hooked to a Buddistick. We're both running 5 watts. My antenna is a doublet in my attic in New York. Coast-to-Coast on 5 watts and a couple of suboptimal antennas on a dead band. Ahhhhh....the joy of the unexpected! 72, Stan WB2LQF ______________________________________________________________ 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
