[Elecraft] Craziest / most rewarding QSOs

[David Gilbert]

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
>
>
>
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