On a roll: DXCC #301 and other DX musings
A fine week of Morse Coding around the world…
Vadym UT6UD, op at S21XV
S21XV Bangladesh
For the past few days I’ve seen S21XV spotted by European and Asian DXers. W3LPL also spotted him a few times but that indicates nothing useful to me.
If it was convenient at the time, I’d tune to his spotted freq and be rewarded with white noise…half a dozen times, maybe?
While expecting the same this morning, I left the antenna pointed SW toward Clipperton and tuned to 14.025 for my daily dose of Vitamin Q(RN).
What I heard caused me to perform some weird gymnastic feat as I hit the rotor with one hand and toggled the A/B VFO switch and spun the dial looking for his receive freq with the other.
AmbiDXterity?!
Dang, he’s loud! Please don’t fade and don’t QRT yet – I just need another minute! Spin, rotator - spin! We can put a man on the moon; can’t we build a faster rotator?
It was a Monday morning pile-up – small. Two calls and into the log as #301.
Spasibo, Vadym.
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XT2TT Burkina Faso
Finally finished working late last night on a sick radar at work and got home at midnight sharp. I needed XT2TT on only one band for a clean sweep – 80m. On past evenings, they were on some other band or some non-CW mode. Last night – 80 CW, and lonely. I normally just automatically turn on the amp if I need something on 80m but I had a feeling he wasn’t going to stick around much longer since he was repeatedly calling CQ with no takers.
Called him at 100 watts and he replies “AE AE ?” Called again and now we’re up to “AE5 AE5 ?”
The third time’s a charm – clean sweep of XT on 10-80.
He worked two others and then went QRT.
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ET3AA Ethiopia
This one had been announced in the DX bulletins some time ago but all the ops there are new. I wasn’t holding out much hope of getting them on CW. Huge pile-ups and new CW ops don’t go well together.
Or so I thought. Who was that guy? ET3AA is a club station set up by Sid ET3SID and a few other key players – there’s no way to know which individual I worked but he was fast and proficient, both with pile-ups and CW.
QSL via N2OO received in 6 days via online request and a PayPal’ed fiver.
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TX5K Clipperton
A chip shot from here. I don’t have an antenna for 160 meters and my tuner refused to marry rig to the 80m dipole on 160 meters. So I did something idiotic…or not, depending on your POV – I pulled an old tuner out of the closet and put it in series with my AT2K tuner.
Together as a team, the gave the rig a 1:1 SWR. TX5K goes into the log on all bands 10-160.
An interesting thing about Clipperton is that it provides us here in the southwestern US an idea of what it sounds like to be on the business end of a man-sized pile-up. Clipperton is closer to a lot of us in W5/W6 than Boston or Seattle so we can hear the world in our receivers very similar to how they are in Clipperton in terms of signal strengths and congestion.
So I tried my hand at discerning individual callsigns from the amalgam. Thankfully for the DXers throughout the world, I’m at home – not at TX5. If I were there, I’d be logging one call for every 8 of whoever is manning their 15m CW station at this moment.
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Themocracy
Congratulations on #301, John. That’s quite an accomplishment.
…and lucky timing. If I’d had to work today I still wouldn’t have him. How I envy retirees!
Congrats John! #301 is a great accomplishment. I listened to the recording and you are correct, dang he’s loud, LOL.
This morning I also worked him for an ATNO. W2IRT had said there was no pile up. Are you kidding me? His QSO rate was about one per minute. I also heard quite a few reports being given with no confirmations. Luckily for me my confirmation came right away with no QRMer trying to steal my QSO. I’m in heaven and I know you feel the same!
73,
Jonathan W6GX
Congrats Jonathan. I still don’t get why such small pile-ups for such a strong and rare entity. I forgot to mention that after working him, I switched to my dipole to see if I could still copy him. I could easily – he went from S8 to about S3 (am I sounding like a CB’er?!) but still perfectly workable.
I have a theory on the small pile up. A DX’er thinks ‘I’ve never heard S2 so therefore I probably won’t hear them this time’ and they don’t check the frequency. How many times have you tuned to a spot by W3LPL and heard nothing but white noise, LOL.
73,
Jonathan W6GX
Again, today!
A few obscure spots, small pile-up and of course that robot spot (W3LPL) yet instead of white noise I actually heard Z81Z in South Sudan.
Fortunately, he heard me too. A new band-country (10m).
This morning I worked S21S on 20m. He was running QRP on a Yaesu 817. His signal peaked at S8. I couldn’t believe it. I forgot to make a recording of my QSO. I have never heard S2 in my short ham career until this week. When it rains it pours :-) Amazing.
73,
Jonathan W6GX
To not hear S2 for decades and then to hear them QRP is beyond amazing – it’s bizarre. That is a tough part of the world for NA and now so many of us working 2 stations there…it must have to do with planetary line-up!