Odd propagation
A couple of weeks ago, I turned on the rig, tuned up on 30 meters, and called CQ. The first station I worked was KB8FCG. According to QRZ.Com, KB8FCG is 28.8 miles away from me. The signal was S9 here in Ann Arbor. That seems a little too far for ground wave, but a little too close for sky wave.
The second station I worked that even was S57V. QRZ.Com says that S57V is is 4,600 miles away. He gave me a 579 report.
Is zero beating a lost art?
Zero beating is the practice of matching your transmitting frequency to that of the station you’re calling or are in contact with. Because most new rigs have DSP filtering, zero beating is more important than ever. If you call a station calling CQ, and your transmit frequency is off by more than 100 Hz, the station calling CQ may never hear you because you’ll be outside the passband.
I had this happen twice the other night. The first station to answer my CQ was 250 Hz up, the second was 250 Hz down. If I hadn’t seen these two stations on my bandscope, I never would have heard them.
The moral of the story is that if you’re answering a CQ, get as close to the station’s transmit frequency as you can. You do this by matching the frequency of the incoming signal to the frequency of your sidetone. That is to say that if you have your sidetone set to 500 Hz, the frequency that you hear when you’re receiving should also be 500 Hz.
There are a bunch of good YouTube videos on the topic. Here’s a good one:
A new Q signal?
So, I’ve been on the air quite a while now, and have contacted many stations many times. That being the case, I generally don’t need them to send me their name and location. I’d like to propose a new Q signal that will tell the other station that there’s no send this information again.
My first thought was to use QHI. There’s already a definition for QHI, but it’s not used at all in ham radio, and I bet that we could get away with it. WATSA OMs?
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