[Lowfer] JA/VE7 QSO Completed - FINALLY!

[Scott Tilley]

  Finally!  After months of trying, our gear, conditions and most of all 
our XYL's patience all worked together to produce a QSO!

JA7NI (DFCW30) and VE7TIL (DFCW60) completed a trans-pacific QSO on 
2200m this morning a first between Canada and Japan.  CN89dk to QM09fl 
is 7162km.

Things started off with a surprise as NI copied TIL's beacon signal 
30min before his sunrise.  What followed was a 'quick' exchange of calls 
and NI's report was received by TIL.  Then a very long and deep fade 
occurred.  This happened before to us and we lost each other and an 
entire nights sleep...!  But that taught us a lesson and we adapted to 
the deep fading on this path by creating a master slave relationship 
between the stations and using QSK to full effect.  Master slave means 
the station that is expecting a reply simply waits until he hears it 
while the other station transmits until heard with pauses (QSK) to 
listen...   NI waited patiently not knowing TIL had copied the calls and 
his report.  Our procedure was for him to simply wait until he copied 
something...  Three hours later RO appeared on NI's screen and during 
one of my crawls out of the bunk I saw a dot during a pause in 
transmission and stopped the transmitter.  A few minutes later there was 
an R and TU but not in DFCW but rather QRSS as a malfunction at NI's end 
had him scrambling, but he recovered with grace and the QSO was in the 
bag...

This QSO caps off months of work by both operators in improving their 
stations and beaconing on the path to learn its characteristics to make 
a QSO possible.  What is clear to me is the trans-pacific path on 2200m 
is a very viable communication path for amateur experimentation.  I'm 
sure time will demonstrate this further as procedures and equipment 
improve on both sides of the ocean.

I would like to particularly thank Yas, JA8SCD (the Tokyo Grabber) for 
his help and translation services.  Without him this would have been 
much more difficult.

More details including station equipment to follow in the next few days 
as I get caught up on my sleep and family life :-)

73 Scott
VE7TIL CN89dk
http://www3.telus.net/sthed/argo/