You know, there is something quite appealling about operating QRP. I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but I think it has something to do with being able to make contacts with something that runs off batteries and that you can hold in the palm of your hand. I’m not ready to sell my IC-746PRO, but the KX-1 is really a lot of fun to operate.
This weekend, I operated it in two different contests: QRP Afield and the Flying Pigs’ Run for the Bacon. As I reported earlier, I really was afield on Saturday, operating in both the ARRL’s Amateur Radio Awareness Day / Emergency Power Operating Event and the QRP Afield contest. I was sharing an antenna with Bruce KD8APB and his IC-706, so I was just operating casually, but even so, made eight contacts.
I worked the Flying Pigs’ monthly Run for the Bacon sprint last night. This is a two-hour sprint, and was a lot of fun. I made nine contacts in about an hour, including seven different states, for a score of 189.
The Run for the Bacon is a bit unusual in that scoring is really on the honor system. There’s a web page on which you enter your score–and a comment if you like– and a web-based program scores your entry and posts it immediately to the website. That’s kind of cool.
This being my first RTFB, there was one thing that kind of puzzled me at first. After a QSO, guys would sign “OO.” Now, an OO to me is an Official Observer, but that just didn’t seem right in this context. It finally occurred to me that “OO” is the Flying Pig abbreviation for “Oink Oink.” :)
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