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Half a DX Station

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Richard Fryer VA7AA/XE1 sent me an email the other day. Something about strange DX. Read it below.

…know you guys are really into contests, beams, towers and traditional ham related stuff but I thought I’d share an oddball strange DX contact I had recently… 

It was DX for me… but in reality only 1/2 DX … lemme explain… remembering I am here in Melaque Mexico… VA7AA/XE1.. I installed a new EFHW vertical for 20… good antenna and it also works fine on 10m  

Listening on 29.640 to the VE3MMX-R 10m FM repeater near Chatham Ontario… it comes in here every day, so it seems…must have a pipeline LOL… but all of a sudden GI0BQX in Belfast Ireland is heard calling… worked him “full quieting” as they say in repeater lingo, .LOL …him running 40 watts into a home brew vertical on his house roof. Me… an FT 891 100 watts.. so sorta the same antenna. So I worked half a DX station.. the repeater did all the work.  Somehow I don’t think I’ll be doin that too often….

Richard VA7AA/XE1

Club Zoom Call – Feb. 27th

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The club had a very good Zoom meeting Thursday evening (Feb. 27th). Seventeen members joined together to have a conversation about the club. More than half of the attendees were from locations other than Victoria. It was great to have them on the call.

Numerous ideas were discussed: some big, some small. Basically, it was “How do we keep the club fresh? How do we keep things from getting stale?”

It’s about balance. If the club gets too big with a bunch of new initiatives, we may flounder. If we stay as we are, we may wither. Fortunately we talked about ideas that are “implementable”. And three or four things seem to keep members happy: the occasional members’ emails with news; the occasional blog post; club Zoom calls; and focused emails (e.g, contesting) for members interested in… contesting.

One new thing will soon be implemented. A website page focused on portable HF operations e.g., mobile HF operations and POTA HF operations.

Glenn VA7HC

160 Meter SSB Contest

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I participated (for a total of 45 minutes) in the CQ 160 meter SSB contest on Friday and Saturday evenings.  160 is a real struggle for my short vertical and under-sized radials (probably way less than 1% antenna efficiency on 160), but I was encourage by my results in the CW version of the contest, so thought I would give it a try.  SSB signals need a LOT more bandwidth (over 50 times) than CW, so the resultant increase in broadband noise at the receiving end severely limited my efforts!  I could work some (but not all) signals who were a true 59+, but no one else could hear me.  All my contacts were with US stations:  I could hear VA7MM quite well, but he couldn’t hear me!  My furthest DX was Idaho and Colorado (they must have had a low noise level there).

I posted my meager results (10 contacts, 350 points) on 3830 and gave credit to IHF.  At least I wasn’t last!

73

Roger

VE7AP