[Elecraft] Craziest / most rewarding QSOs

[Wes Stewart]

A couple come to mind but one stands out.  Without digging out dozens of old 
paper logs I'll guess about 1982-83 I was on 2M EME pointed west to my setting 
moon looking for JA or UA9.  I heard a CQ and copied W5UN.  I'd worked Dave many 
times, even on 2XSSB so I continued to tune.  A few hundred Hz from Dave's 
frequency I heard another station, considerably weaker.  It took some digging 
but I finally copied W5UN again!  I was taken aback until I realized that I was 
hearing him off the moon and off the back of my antenna on tropo.  The nearly 
setting moon was imparting Doppler and a 2 second time delay, causing me to hear 
two completely different signals.  I worked him and I'm pretty sure it must have 
been EME.  BTW, Dave is 950 miles from me.

Wes  N7WS

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
>