Saturday, I made absolutely no CW contacts on the HF bands. I spent all day riding around in a sag wagon supporting a local bicycle event called One Helluva Ride. That’s yours truly in the front seat of the SAG wagon in the photo at right. It was very hot and sunny, and we spent a lot of time picking up people who just couldn’t make it.
You can’t really see it in the picture, but we got a cool T-shirt with a picture of a Sandhill Crane on it. Sandhill Cranes are one of the largest birds in North America, and there’s a crane reserve in the are where they were bicycling. They are truly spectacular birds, and you can often spot them while driving or bicycling in that area. I saw a pair out in a farm field on Saturday.
Although the sag wagons were pretty busy picking up passengers, we were fortunate in that there were no major accidents or injuries. We had a good crew, too, including several that I taught, either in one of my one-day classes or in one of the General classes. One of them, Mike, KD8SRU, was in the most recent class.
Sunday, I went down to the museum for a little while. It was only a little while because the band conditions were so poor. One of my Twitter friends blamed this on a coronal mass ejection. I heard nearly no signals at all on 20m, either CW or phone. I did manage to eke out one CW contact, but then just gave up because it was so hard to make contacts.
Later that evening, conditions were a little bit better. I did manage to make one contact with a station in Florida on 30m, but the propagation was really strange. The only station spotting my CQs on reversebeacon.net was PJ2T. I QSYed to 40m and made one contact there before pulling the plug.
Leave a Reply