I was going to take down the 160 vertical
this weekend to rebuild it, figuring the
"season" was over. I decided to put it
on the air for one last night on Saturday.
At 0130 I turned on the rig and heard no
activity on CW, and lots of power line
noise. So I decided that I needed to call
CQ. After working a W7, I CQ'ed some more and,
unbelieveably, ZS6UT came back to my CQ at his
sunrise. He was Q5 copy on QSB peaks and I was
able to complete a QSO, for my first African QSO
and completion of WAC. (I still don't have any
mainland European QSO's, but EA8BH counts for
Europe). About 15 minutes later, I
heard ZS6UT working N7JW, but he had faded to
almost nothing. I also got an XE2 coming
back to my CQ after the ZS.
Sunday morning, again there was no activity,
so I called CQ. I worked one JA, who gave
me 589, but had no calls after that. There
could have been other JA's obscured by the
power line noise. The JA activity seems
to be confined to contest weekends. Just
before my sunrise, I heard a pileup on
DU9/N0NM, and worked him on the first call.
He had a nice sunrise peak.
It seems like you never know what might
happen on topband. As it turned out, it
started raining Sunday morning, and I decided
to wait a week before taking down the vertical.
Rick Karlquist N6RK
richard@karlquist.com
www.n6rk.com
www.karlquist.com
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