I've had my share of weird ones, but one that sticks in my mind was during Field Day several years ago. I'm not sure, but I think I was using my new K1 that year. Bob, K7ZB and I were operating up on the Mogollon Rim of Arizona, and one of the antennas I was checking out the night before the contest was a long, low vertically oriented rectangular loop that EZNEC+ told me should give a decent match on both 40m and 20m. It was ten feet long on the vertical end sections, something like 40 or 50 feet long on the horizontal sections, fed in the middle of one of the ten foot verticals, and the lower horizontal wire was about five feet off the ground. The idea was to get low angle vertical radiation with some broadside gain, which in retrospect was a dumb idea given the horrible ground conductivity in that area. It turned out to be the very worst antenna I've ever used for Field Day and we had our worst score ever as a result ... and this is from two guys who in the year 2000 (with totally different antennas ... hi) set was was then the all time record for 1B 2OP - Battery with 970 QSOs and an even 10,000 points. The low rectangular loop was simply pure trash.
But ... that night before the contest while I was testing it out on 20m CW I heard an FR5 (middle of the Indian Ocean) calling CQ. He was about S5 and came back to me on my first call with only five watts from my end. Propagation is a strange and fickle mistress.
73, Dave AB7E On 9/13/2018 5:45 PM, Wayne Burdick wrote:
15 meters never fails to amaze me. During a recent bout of paper log archaeology, I rediscovered a QSO I logged as a teen, in 1972. I was just minding my own business, tuning up using a Heath DX-20 driving 3 feet of coax to a 40 W incandescent bulb. Then a guy in Illinois called me.... Some years later I was using a home-brew rig (the “Safari 4”) while visiting my Mom in Arizona. The battery was nearly depleted, the rig putting out only 200 mW. The antenna: 8 feet of wire running directly from the rig through a window to a clothesline. Tuning slowly, I heard a CQ from Rwanda (9X5). I called him and got a “QRZ?” With a *lot* of patience on his end, we completed a basic QSO. No computer, no narrow filtering, no noise blanker. I would’ve gone nuts for a KX2 back in those days. 73, Wayne N6KR ---- http://www.elecraft.com ______________________________________________________________ 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 Message delivered to xda...@cis-broadband.com
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