I was on the tower wrestling with two runs of 3/4" CATV cable I am
installing when I realized the sun was right in my face and it was
Tuesday. That can only mean one thing: time to get down and fire up the
rig for 222 Activity Night! It was about 6:30 local time at that point.
That is late in the day for me to even have my eyelids up, let alone be
actively engaged in battle up on a tower. I guess I was still running on
adrenaline from the excitement of discovering that I really could push
two more runs of that cable through 90 feet of buried conduit that was
already pretty full. The darn mice chewed off the pull rope I had in the
conduit during the winter, but without a second person to assist it
wouldn't have helped with this job anyway. The bad news is I was not
able to get the first new cable through with a new pull rope alongside,
so now I have no rope through the conduit. I might need to add another
control cable at some point, and if I do the only option will be to pull
an existing control cable out while pulling a rope or two new cables in.
Oh well. It can be done, just not in a preferred or easy way.
Stations worked:
N1JEZ FN44 SSB
K1WHS FN43 SSB
WZ1V FN31 SSB
K1PXE FN31 CW
WA1PBU FN42 CW 10 watts!
WA1T FN43 CW
N1JEZ was surprisingly weak and I was worried about conditions. K1WHS
was loud but I can't judge conditions from that. Dave is always loud!
WZ1V was calling CQ on CW. I tried to answer on CW but my keyer paddle
had dust in the contacts and all I was getting was a mess of random dits
and dahs. Ron switched over to SSB where we easily had a brief chat with
100% copy. Things were looking up!
After Ron I wasn't hearing anybody else. I took a short break to clean
the paddle contacts and stretch. A few minutes later I came back to hear
K1PXE calling CQ on CW, solid 559 which is uncommonly strong for Pete.
When I called, Pete said "Wow" and he remained very solid throughout our
QSO.
When I finished with Pete I heard someone call me while sliding up in
frequency. I followed and it was WA1PBU with 10 watts! Absolutely solid
529 and I never missed a dit during the QSO.
WA1T called me right after WA1PBU. Al was solid 559 and said he was
running without the amplifier.
After that I called CQ for a while, tuned around for a while, called CQ
some more, tuned around some more but couldn't find anyone else to work.
I didn't feel motivated to try FT8.
73,
Paul N1BUG
FN55mf
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