It’s funny where the mind leads sometimes: Remembering Nose KH6IJ
Over the last couple of days I’ve been playing some 28MHz JT65A in the late afternoon and early evening. The band hasn’t been great but there have been plenty of reports from South America and good to see some other stations too.
I was looking at the PSK Reporter website and the mapping of stations that had heard me and those I’d heard. As I looked at the Pacific Ocean, where I haven’t been heard in the last few days, my mind went back to my first QSO with Hawaii on 28MHz.
It was probably back in the late 1980s or maybe early 1990s. I was living in Cheltenham in a house with a garden around 9 feet wide by 20 feet long. I had a Butternut vertical up (26 feet tall). I had to retreat into the house to get it to an angle such that I could then walk out into the garden and get it to the vertical plane!
At the time I was very active on CW on HF. Late one afternoon, I heard an individual sounding morse signal on the bottom end of 28MHz. It was Nose KH6IJ. Nose was probably the most famous operator from Hawaii at the time and I was thrilled to hear him. Even more thrilled and surprised when he came back to my call. We had a brief QSO – a really nice one.
I doubt I have worked Hawaii on 28MHz from the UK since – I don’t chase these things anymore. But it’s always a thrill to work half way around the world.
Wind forward to this evening. I googled KH6IJ and I found a really fascinating article about him, with lots of facts that I didn’t know before. I hope you enjoy the article as much as I did!
I worked Nose, when I was a kid in the ’60s, on 40m cw when I lived near Washington, D.C. Turned out he was a friend of one of my high school teachers. (W4JZZ/W5GWD sk) I was thrilled when I received his QSL card, but it didn’t impress any of the girls I knew. LOL 73 Rich k4tft