Wow,
Conditions last night sure were a pleasant surprise here in Southern
California. I had just strung a set of Christmas lights up to the top of my
105' shunt fed tower and turned them on when the telephone rang. Ron, K6UR
said that "tonight could be the night" for an EU opening in our area of the
US. Conditions were good according to WWV. Ron was right on the mark. I
wasn't sure what would happen if I ran 1500 Watts into my shunt fed tower
while I had Christmas Lights on. Would my GFCI circuit breakers start
blowing? Would I fry my receiver front end if something shorted out? Would
1500 Watts of RF combined with 1000 Watts of "light-wave power" constitute a
FCC regulation violation. Yikes, let's not even go there!
This was the first evening this year that I've heard any EU stations.
Stations were much weaker than many of the openings we had last year. Most
signals were just at the noise level here occasionally popping above the
noise level long enough for a QSO. I logged the following stations:
SM4CAN - 0403z
DJ7AA - 0409z
F5IN - 0445z
FO5BI - 0459z (new one)
C6AIE - 0525z
CT1FGW - 0637z (new one)
EI5HE - 0703z (new one)
Heard DF2PY and G3PQA but couldn't copy quite good enough to try a QSO.
SM4CAN was the strongest EU I heard until CT1FGW showed up. Surprised that
DF2PY wasn't better copy since he was consistently the strongest station out
of EU at my QTH last season. Let's hope conditions hold up for a while!
Happy Holidays
73, Bob K6ZZ
Mojave, CA.
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