[Lowfer] 137 kHz 2E0ILY-N1BUG QSO complete

[N1BUG]

Four nights, Jay. We went old school and used night by night
sequencing. On the best nights Chris is plenty strong enough here
for JT9 or DFCW3 which would allow a quick QSO, but relatively long
time integration is needed for him to copy me. The hard part is the
anxiety waiting for the next night to see where the QSO stands and
wondering if you're going to eventually complete it. :-)

Paul



On 03/28/2018 03:29 PM, Jay Hainline wrote:
> Congratulations Paul! So how much time was actually spent to make the QSO? I
> wasn't quite sure on your posting. 
> 
> Jay KA9CFD
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: lowfer-bounces at mailman.qth.net <lowfer-bounces at mailman.qth.net> On
> Behalf Of N1BUG
> Sent: March 28, 2018 19:10
> To: rsgb_lf_group at blacksheep.org; rsgb_lf_group at yahoogroups.co.uk;
> Discussion of the Lowfer (US, European, & UK) and MedFer bands
> <lowfer at mailman.qth.net>
> Subject: [Lowfer] 137 kHz 2E0ILY-N1BUG QSO complete
> 
> Last night Chris 2E0ILY and myself completed a DFCW60 QSO over a
> 4731 km path on 137 kHz. To my knowledge this is the first USA to Europe two
> way amateur radio QSO on the band. My sincere thanks to Chris for his time
> and effort to make this happen!
> 
> I apologize if being in the WSPR band created problems for anyone. I asked
> Chris to give up four nights (or more) of other activity to do this. I did
> not want to additionally ask him to spend hours tuning the antenna elsewhere
> and then back again.
> 
> Signals were at times outstanding with three hours of perfectly solid copy
> here one night. While not quite that good in the other direction, I am very
> pleased with the copy Chris had on me. We would not be able to make it on
> any other QSO mode, but slow DFCW made it possible!
> 
> This QSO was like an adventure. :-) The first night of transmitting I had to
> constantly retune the antenna due to influence of very heavy snow squalls.
> I'm glad I put a motor on the variometer.
> Without it, transmitting that night would not have been possible.
> 
> 73,
> Paul N1BUG FN55mf