The sun’s been rather active as far as solar flares go. Last night, I could tell this by the contacts I made. I had QSOs with Art, K8CIT in Northern Michigan and Bill, WA7NCL. Both exhibited definite auroral flutter.
I’m not a propagation expert, but could the signals been bouncing off an aurora somehow? What do you think?
Speaking of propagation, we have a dilemma when it comes to 40m propagation in the summer. We all want good propagation, but conditions that are favorable for amateur radio signals are also favorable for atmospheric noise. So, the better the band conditions, the noisier the band, as we’re able to copy the QRN by storms farther away.
Have you ever noticed that when a guy copies your call wrong, it’s sometimes impossible to get him to get it correctly? I worked a DX station a couple of days ago, and he first copied my call as KB7NU. Even after sending my call two or three times on my next two transmissions, he still thought I was KB7NU. Only on my final transmission did he realize the error and get my correct callsign. I know that in the past I’ve had several contacts where the other operator never got my call right despite several repeats.
I worked my first reader. About a week ago, I worked the first guy who had read The CW Geek’s Guide to Having Fun with Morse Code. It was fun to get comments about the book, directly over the air, in code.
Mike K8XF says
Auroral condx are fun to work with. When I lived in Detroit one summer the AU condx were such that I had fun working AU on 2M CW, had a beam for 2M SSB/CW up 65 ft and I had fun working the back scatter off the AU.
Dave, N8SBE says
In contest exchanges, the common protocol is to refuse to acknowledge the other station’s exchange, until they get your call correct. It goes like this:
CQer: W1XYZ QRZ
S&P: N8SBE
CQer: N8HBE 7A CT
S&P: N8SBE
CQer: N8SBE 7A CT
S&P: 3A MI
CQer: TU W1XYZ QRZ
Wonder if that somehow could be adapted to casual exchanges? Maybe just respond with nothing except your call sign (or his call DE yours), until the caller gets it right?