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Despite the poor propagation conditions occurring during the current solar minimum (which I, and practically every other ham has written about ad nauseam), I continue to make some good, and sometimes outstanding DX contacts. A couple of weeks ago, I had a CW contact with Richard, 9M2CNC in West Malaysia on 20m at around 8pm local time. While I’d worked West Malaysia before (in fact with Richard as well, then operating as 9M2/G4ZFE during an RTTY contest), that was the first CW contact that I had with that DXCC entity. I’m happy to say that the contact has been confirmed via Logbook of the World already.

Yesterday afternoon, I was working from home and took and saw a spot for Bill, E51NOU on 17m CW. The interesting thing was that it was the middle of the afternoon (not normally a good time for propagation to that part of the world), but I was easily able to make the contact.

Best of all, early this afternoon, I saw some spots for Wim, XU7TZG in Cambodia on 20m phone. The time was around 1PM local time, which means it was around midnight in Cambodia, late for this type of contact. I tuned to the frequency and was surprised to hear Wim working a (surprisingly small) pileup. I needed a contact with Cambodia as an “all-time new one” for DXCC purposes, so I figured that I might as well try to call him. Wim slowly worked the pile down (presumably getting the stronger stations out of the way), and after 30 minutes or so, I was very pleased him respond to my call, and the contact was completed.

All three of the contacts I’ve just discussed were made under fairly poor solar conditions. The solar conditions when I worked Wim in Cambodia were about as bad as you can get. The solar flux number was 69, which I believe is the minimum value possible (I’ll have to go read up and see why it doesn’t go to zero) and there were no sunspots at all. Both of those values indicate poor propagation. Fortunately, like the urban legend (check out that link, it’s a good explanation of that legend) that says that it’s aerodynamically impossible for bees to fly, radio waves don’t bother to listen to scientists nor do they study physics.

As I’ve said before: Stop complaining about how poor the conditions are. Turn on your radio. Listen around and if you don’t hear anything, call CQ. You might be surprised at the kind of wonderful contacts you can make.

eally slick thing is that as soon as you upload it, they do an immediate syntax check (so you’ll know if there are any errors), then post your claimed score on their website along with everyone else in your category.

I submitted as Outside Europe, Single Operator, Multi-band, low power and I guess I’m kind of in the middle of the pack at the moment. Of course, this is subject to log checking (I may have made an error logging a station or two) and it will change as others submit their logs, but it’s nice to get immediate feedback. Another excellent use of technology by the contest organizers.

One nice side-effect of just “playing around” in the contest was that I did not only work OH0Z on Aland Island on 75m, but as soon as I uploaded my log to Logbook of The World this afternoon I got a confirmation of that contact, bringing me to 97 countries confirmed on that band. I’m getting pretty close to being able to submit for the 5 Band DXCC award.

Posted via email from K2DBK’s Ham Radio Blog

I’ve been a fan of Logbook of The World (LoTW) since it was announced by the ARRL, and have written about it in previous posts. I’ve gotten a lot of stations confirmed by the use of this electronic QSL method, but today was, I think, the first time that I’ve gotten a confirmation for an all-time new entity via LoTW prior to receiving a physical card. By way of explanation, for new entities, I always send out a card to the station that I worked. At this point that’s a relatively rare occurrence, so I normally mail my QSL card to the other station pretty quickly. Under the best of circumstances, I’m thrilled to hear back from the other station in 2 or 3 weeks. It’s not unusual to wait 3 months or even longer (sometimes a lot longer; I’m still getting cards back from stations that I contacted in 2000), but in this case, I got confirmation via LoTW today for a contact made just 3 days ago. In fact, the total elapsed time between me “sending” my QSL record to LoTW and the confirmation being made was a grand total of 36 hours. (This information is available within the system.) You can’t beat that kind of turnaround time.

It’s not that unusual to get a confirmation from a domestic US station within minutes of a contact (especially at the end of a contest, where many stations all upload their log information at once), but this is a confirmation of a contact that I made with a station located in the Solomon Islands. Wow.

And yes, I will send for a physical card for this contact as well, just because it’s fun to have the cards.

Posted via email from k2dbk’s posterous