[Lowfer] Happy (Within Reason) New year

[JD]

Yesterday evening I took a nap in anticipation of being up this late a 
second night in a row.  As it turns out, I probably should have just gone 
straight to the field.  When I began just after 10 PM CST, Stefan's signal 
was showing dogbones on Argo.  I got a nice solid F and C--and then somebody 
switched off the North Atlantic in the middle of whatever the next letter 
was supposed to be!  I got two dits, and then nothing further in the 
European window the rest of the night.

In the upper segment of the band, MP was lighting up the interior of the car 
and the "VO1NA HNY" greeting was there quite nicely too.  Might I suggest to 
Joe, though, that the faster QRSS rate would work better with a little 
greater frequency shift.  There were times during a few of the deeper brief 
fades that QRSS20 Slow detected the presence of signal more clearly than 
QRSS30 did, but it was harder to see when the transition between frequencies 
occured.  (I was running two simultaneous instances of Argo to be able to 
make that comparison.  I'll dig out those captures later today when I can 
see well enough to work on them and compress the daylights out of 'em for 
posting.)  Both MP and VO1NA remained visible every time I checked 
throughout the night, and MP was clearly audible every time.

At 185, WMS was solid and steady all night.  So was SIW down at 185.185.  No 
sign of WM, unfortunately.  BR was not very strong early in the evening, 
with only the Morse ID being audible at first.  Later, in the wee hours, 
some of the voice came through too.  I checked a few times for SJ and PBO, 
but probably without success.  There was a trace that I thought might maybe 
possibly be Sal's signal if I wished hard enough, but it was broken up 
sufficiently that I couldn't be sure, and I thought the keying rate looked 
too slow.  Nothing at all where PBO should be, alas.  I'll have to keep 
trying when winter nighttime conditions permit.

Europe 1 was the dominant LWBC tonight, though Iceland was also doing pretty 
well by the time I shut down and returned to town.

Happy New Year to all, and to all a good night.

John
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