AmateurRadio.com

It was a tough go on the 80 Meter QRP Fox hunt tonight.

First off, I never heard TJ WØEA in Iowa at all.  This was not a surprise; as Iowa is a tough haul for 80 Meters.  I really wasn’t expecting to hear TJ at all.  What did surprise me was that I didn’t hear any of his pursuing Hounds, either.

I did manage to get into Lee AA4GA’s log.  A QSO between Georgia and New Jersey is way more realistic for 80 Meters.  But there was a ton of QRM and some pretty loud QRN which made it a bit tougher than it should have been.  I got in Lee’s log with 11 minutes to go – these hunts last 90 minutes.  So there was 79 minutes of trying to figure out Lee’s listening sequence, dealing with QRM, etc.

One thing that made it a lot easier was using the KX3 tonight and making use of the “Dual Watch” function.  For those of you who don’t have a KX3, this is where you use both the main receiver and the sub-receiver together.  You turn on the Dual Watch function and plug in a pair of stereo headphones.  The main receiver goes to one ear while the sub-receiver goes to the other ear.  This makes it a breeze to find where the last successful Hound was transmitting, tune the sub-receiver there and then go to town with operating split. As long as the two frequencies do not exceed a 15 kHz split, the Dual Watch function takes a lot of the guess work out of operating split.

The W3EDP served me in good stead again tonight, getting me a “one-fer” – one out of two Fox pelts.  Hey, if I was a Major Leaguer, a .500 batting average would make me a very wealthy man!

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP – When you care to send the very least!