CB0ZA
A couple nights ago, I turned on the radio and could see two big pileups on 30-meter CW. Down towards the lower portion of the band, there was a big pileup, and up towards 10120 kHz, a decidedly smaller one.
So, I fired up DX Summit, the DX spotting website, to see what was going on. As it turned out, it was the 8R7X DXpedition (Uganda) pileup with the bigger pileup, and the CB0ZA DXpedtion with the smaller one. That was just fine with me, not only because I doubt that I would have cracked the 8R7X pileup, but because I’d already worked and confirmed 8R. Plus, CB0ZA would be an all-time new one for me.
So, I turned my attention to CB0ZA. They were a bit weak, but I reckoned that I could still work them, as I had worked a Chilean station several times in the past month. I set up the rig to work split and listened for a bit to see where they were listening, and then called.
I was kind of surprised, but they replied to that very first call! The next day, I discovered that the contact was confirmed in Logbook of the World. That brings my total up to 171 distinct entities confirmed.
Poor keyboard fist?
On the CWops mailing list, there’s a discussion about operators with poor fists and how we might be able to help them. The primary focus was on operators using straight keys and bugs, but tonight, I worked another kind of poor fist. The fellow was using a keyboard and was making a lot of typing mistakes. For example, instead of “HW R U?,” he would type, “HIW SRE YOU?”
Now, he was a nice fellow, and he apologized for being “fat fingered,” so it wasn’t that big a deal. Just remember, though, that when using a keyboard, to try to be as accurate a typist as you can be.
Also remember to use CW abbreviations as you would if sending by hand. It’s easy to type out whole words if you’re using a keyboard, but the operator on the other end will be expecting abbreviations. So use them.
Not many cherries in Cherry Valley
A couple of days ago, I worked a guy in Cherry Valley, NY. When I asked him if there were a lot of cherries in Cherry Valley, he laughed and said that there weren’t that many cherries, but there were a lot of cows!
A quick scan of QRZ.Com shows that there are at least five Cherry Valleys in the U.S—Arkansas, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York—and one in Ontario. Cherry Valley, CA takes the cake (pun intended) with 58 licensees in the QRZ.Com database.
Dave, N8SBE says
I worked CB0ZW in the ARRL DX CW contest last weekend, just before the contest was over 7pm Sunday evening ET, but my call never showed up in the ClubLog database. Sounds like they busted my call, which could be so, because others were stomping on them, so they might have sent N8SDE or some such, which happens often, when the other station misses a dot here and there, and I missed correcting them.
Klaus says
8R is NOT Uganda
Dan KB6NU says
Ahhh, right. 8R is Guyana. The end result is the same. I already have 8R in the log.