Operating notes: a compendium of recent interesting contacts

A couple of evenings ago, I had a couple of interesting contacts with stations running QRP. That wasn’t the most interesting thing about the contacts, though.

The contact with Kyle, KN6KJK, was remarkable for a couple of reasons:

1. He was a Tech operating CW on 40m.
2. He used my study guide to prepare for his Tech exam (and he thanked me for that.)
3. KJK are actually his initials, and he was randomly assigned that callsign from the call sign pool.

My next contact was with Jerry, KI4PS. He was operating an FT-818 at 5 W. The reason that this contact was interesting is that Jerry cut the contact short, complaining about QRM. There was indeed a signal operating very close to our frequency (see screenshot at left). I’m going to guess that that signal was about 250 Hz down from our frequency of 7028 kHz.

I didn’t hear that signal at all. I had my Flex 6400 filter set to 250 Hz, meaning that the QRM was outside of the passband. That’s a real tribute to the Flex filtering algorithms.

Finally, I worked a guy a couple of days after Christmas who has the following on his QRZ.Com page:

Don’t get the chinese virus vaccine it may contain ID2020 chip as immunity passport. It is part of the mark of the beast!

Seriously??

I had hoped that ham radio operators had more sense, but I guess not. My take on it is that even if there was an ID2020 chip, it wouldn’t be available due to the chip shortage.