A couple of times recently during a contact, I’ve been thanked for giving someone their “CW fix” for the day. The Google dictionary defines it this way:
informal
a dose of a narcotic drug to which one is addicted.
synonyms: dose; informal hit
“he needed his fix”
So, CW has become kind of a drug for these guys. Working CW does get you into a certain mindset that could be compared to a drug high. When you focus on sending and receiving code, you suspend your worries and your cares for that particular moment. In that way, CW works a lot like a drug.
Is it any wonder then that some guys get addicted to CW?
Antenna farm
The other day I worked W9SN on 80m. He was just booming in. When he told me he was using a two-element, 80 m quad antenna, it was apparent why.
I looked him up on QRZ.Com, and my jaw just dropped. He has an antenna farm that I could only marvel at. Here’s a man who really loves ham radio.
Palindromic callsigns
I may have found my next QSL challenge – palindromic callsigns. A palindrome is a word, phrase, number, or any sequence of characters which reads the same backward or forward.
About a week ago, I work KD3DK, and since then I’ve heard AE8EA and KU4UK on the air. I haven’t done any formal analysis, but there has to be thousands of possible palindromic callsigns. EA8AE, for example. His QRZ.Com page show a very nice quad antenna, so I bet he’s very workable.
Have you worked any stations with palindromic callsigns? Do you have any QSL cards with palindromic calls? If so, scan it and send it to me, and I’ll post it here on my blog.
Leave a Reply