[Elecraft] [OT] A Very Quiet Day

[James Bennett]

I can well understand that experience.

Back in 2000 my new XYL and I honeymooned in St. Maarten / PJ7. I took a K2 with me and a length of wire and coax. I managed 40 - 50 CW QSO’s in between other activities. After we got back home I wrote an article that ARRL published in one of their online journals. At one time there was a link to it on the Elecraft site.

Anyway, one of the things I warned prospective vacationers going to non-US sites was to be prepared for some horrendous QRN. As I mentioned in the article, many foreign countries have no laws governing RF interference. You’ll run into all sorts of crud on the power mains, not to mention some really ugly HF band obliterators in the form of cars and trucks. I suspect some places are better than others. In St. Maarten, every time any truck went down the street by our condo I had to take off the headphones for a while - it was bad, with a capital B!

Jim / W6JHB

> On Sep 10, 2020, at 2:17 PM, Tony Estep <esteptony at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Sep 10, 2020 at 2:53 PM Al Lorona <alorona at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> 
>> Power was shut off to my noisy urban neighborhood...radio was amazing
>> yesterday for six glorious hours.
>> 
> ======================
> Well, here's the flip side. My old qth was noisy enough, but the real
> eye-opener came when I toted my KX3 to Hyderabad, India a few years ago. I
> was teaching at the Indian School of Business and living in the faculty
> apartments, and I had brought the KX3 along expecting to hear a bunch of
> call-signs that would sound exotic to a midwestern Yank. So I strung up a
> wire around the walls of my living room, up near the ceiling, and laid a
> counterpoise out along the floor. Donning my headphones I switched it on,
> looking forward to an evening of entertainment as I tuned 20 CW.
> Zowie! What a cacophony of squeals, buzzes, crashes, honks and toots,
> burps, whistles and grinds. The S-meter jumped up to about S9+10 and stuck
> there. Nowhere on the band, it seemed, was there a slot wide enough for a
> signal to peep through. Finally I was able to discern a little peep
> half-buried beneath the layers of trash, a lonely VU2 calling CQ. I
> answered him, but of course to no avail. On a later night I heard a few
> words from a QSO between a local ham and a VR2 in Hong Kong, and that was
> the sum total of my ham experience while there. Where were the noises
> coming from? I dunno -- from everywhere, it sounded like.
> 
> 73,
> Tony KT0NY
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