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I would encourage you all to take part in the Club72 QRP Marathon.  I am having a blast!

After work and dinner, I came down to the basement once again, to try to find some decent DX on the bands. Each day for the month of April (that’s how long the Marathon runs) my goal is to try to work one DX station on each of the bands. Tonight I was successful on 20, 17, 15 and 10 Meters, before the clock turned to 00:00 UTC.  All QSOs were made with the KX3 at 5 Watts

20 Meters – G6PZ in England – HF9V antenna
17 Meters – FG5FR in Guadeloupe – HF9V antenna
15 Meters – CM2YI in Cuba – EDZ antenna
10 Meters – ZL1ALZ in New Zealand – HF9V antenna

And you could have knocked me over with a feather with regards to ZL1ALZ.  I was tuning around 10 Meters just to see what I could hear.  John was quite audible about 579.  I figured he was running at least 100 Watts, possibly more.  I put out my call thinking that he would never hear my 5 Watts. Boy, was I wrong!  First shot, John came back to me!  John has one set of really fine business ears, that’s all I have to say!

According to QRZ, John is 9,088 miles away from me – so that makes this QSO 1,817.6 miles per Watt. And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, made my day!  10 Meters is so wonderful when it’s open and conditions are good. Oh, and by the way, this was my first time working New Zealand using QRP – a very good day, indeed!

The SSN is at 119, and the Solar Flux is 131.  The K Index is 1 and the A Index is 3 – that spells for good DX conditions with a low noise floor.  I sure hope these good conditions last over the weekend.

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

This appeared on their Facebook page today:

This is the EFT-10/20/40, which is a “Trail Friendly” version of their popular EF-10/20/40MKII antenna.  The one shown above comes in at a weight of 3.5 ounces.  The EF-10/20/40MKII, which I have, is already no burden to carry. But if you’re one of those guys who are into serious hiking (can you say Appalachian Trail?), where every quarter of an ounce makes a huge difference, then you may want to look into this baby.

I love my EF-10/20/40MKII.  I tuned it so that I don’t need to use the KX3’s autotuner. It didn’t take long and only needed a minor adjustment – it was THAT close right out of the package.  Using one of these is simplicity in itself – get one end up in a tree, hook the other end to the radio and go to town! And you make contacts – plenty of them.

The LNR Webpage can be found by clicking here.

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

After what seems like a lifetime in the attic the Cobwebb ventured outside for the Easter weekend. What a weekend as well.

I put the little antenna up on the telescopic pole about the same height and the top of the Hustler 6-btv (in the background) and spent a few minutes tuning into various stations then dashing in and out of the house to swap the feeder over between the two antennas. Several dashes later and the freezing cold east wind finally kept me in doors just as 2 VK stations appeared on the cluster. At the time I was on the vertical and paid little attention to them as experience tells me that they wouldn’t be ‘in range’ with my 100w. Especially as I was at home in the st bees dip which usually strips rf out of the ether. I tuned to their operating frequency and was met with stoney silence, as expected.

Out of curiosity I did one last switch and the first station was a real 5 & 9. A few calls later and we managed my first qso with a vk. A few minutes later I bagged my second. Within a few hours I managed 7 new countries in between walking the dog and other family stuff. I can safely say that I will be making a more rugged version of the single wire Cobwebb and retiring the vertical.

Now the bands have returned to their usual quieter state it was certainly a good weekend to be on the radio

I managed to break the pileup on 40 Meters tonight to work Vlad in Senegal for a new band. This makes for contacts now on 40, 20, 17 and 12 Meters, all via QRP. I also worked Vlad once on 20 Meters with QRO power, think it was 85 Watts.

Spring must be on the way though, as the band was super noisy tonight. Lots of QRN made it tough for two QRP rag chews (2X KX3 QSOs, by the way) that I had earlier in the evening. There were static crashes galore! Someone must have been getting some pretty bad thunderstorms.

20 Meters was decent this afternoon, as I was able to work SP6CEW in my ancestral country, Poland. I was also able to work S57KW in Slovenia.

When I spoke with Bob W3BBO on Echo link this afternoon, he told me that he had pretty good success on 17 Meters today. When I was tuning the bands this afternoon, 17, 15 and 12 Meters sounded pretty sparse to me with very few loud signals.

Tomorrow, we are forecast for more snow. Hopefully, it won’t be much. In any event, the ground has had a chance to warm up, so any snow that falls should melt pretty quickly. Spring officially began a few days ago, but it sure hasn’t felt like it.

One of my first radio goals for 2013 is to get about another couple dozen radials down for the HF9V. My Butternut is my “go to” antenna, so it will not be wasted effort. I want to get them down early, so that come late May or early June, they will have disappeared into the grass.

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