A couple of days ago, I was calling CQ on 40 meters, when someone decided they wanted to tune up on my frequency. He had a very strong signal, so it was unlikely that he hadn’t heard me calling CQ. The band wasn’t crowded, so I simply moved up a kHz and began calling again, but I just don’t understand why people do that.
After one or two calls on my new frequency, I get a call from the guy who tuned up on top of me earlier. I know this because he told me that if I’d waited another 10 seconds, he would have answered my CQ earlier.
I explained to him that there was no way for me to know if he was going to call me or not, and that more often than not, stations tuning up tend to just disappear. All I knew is that there was a strong station tuning up on my frequency, and not only that, his tuning up was preventing other stations from calling me.
He seemed to get the idea and apologized.
Ham radio is no place for politics
We proceeded to have a generally nice contact. At one point, however, he mentioned that he had watched Trump’s speech earlier, and while I forget his exact words, I got the impression that he generally approved of the speech. I was a bit taken aback at this. It’s just not good practice to discuss politics on the air, especially on CW!
I simply ignored the comment and moved on to other topics. I’d suggest that you do the same, whether these comments are made on 40-meter CW or 2-meter FM.
CQ SALK
On Mastodon last night, I saw a post from N3VEM about the Narwhal Amateur Radio Society’s Polio on the Air operating event. According to the NARS website, the operating event is a “celebration of the 70th anniversary of the April 12, 1955 US approval of the Salk polio vaccine.” It will run from April 5 – 19, 2025.
Being a member of a Rotary club here in Ann Arbor, this really piqued my interest. Rotary International has been working to eradicate polio for nearly 40 years now, and as a result of our efforts to vaccinate children all over the world, we’re very close to doing so. And, in the past, I’ve set up and operated a special event station to commemorate the founding of Rotary and make people aware of our End Polio Now project.
NARS will be operating five special event stations—W7P, W7O, W7L, W7I, and W0O—during that time. They also say, “Make contact with one, get a QSL card. Make contact with all five, get five QSL cards—and something really neat happens if you collect all five!”
One of the unique aspects of this special operating event is that you can sign up to use one of the special event callsigns as well as hunt the special event stations. See the Polio on the Air web page for details on how to do so. I plan to sign up for several hours and operate CW, of course.