After sitting at the rig for nearly four hours working the Fists Winter Sprint, and achieving a solidly mediocre results, you’d think that I’d have had enough ham radio for one day. Well, you’d be wrong.
My wife has a cold and didn’t feel like going anywhere tonight. In fact, she just wanted to sleep. So, after dinner, I went back down to the shack. I tuned the antenna back to 30m, and tuned around a little. When I didn’t hear anything, I set the rig to 10.109 and then started playing with the computer log from the contest I worked earlier.
As I was playing with the log, ZD8R (Ascension Island) called CQ on that very frequency! How’s that for being in the right place at the right time? I was the first one to contact him before the hoard of DX spotters got on frequency. He gave me a nice 579 report, too. After our QSO, chaos ensued.
A little bit later, I heard V51AS (Namibia) working stations down around 10.105. There were a few stations on frequency, but nothing like the pileup for ZD8R. He even resorted to calling CQ a few times. I don’t know why, but I wasn’t in any real hurry to work him, but eventually, I jumped in there and called and exchanged 559 reports with him.
So, while the results may have been disappointing on 20m, the antenna sure seems to be working quite well on 30m.
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