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VE1BA's shack

Well on Tuesday it's back to work and one of my 2012 ambitions....don't like the word resolution with me it is linked to a list of "non-goals". So for 2012 the buzz word is "ambitions". Well as I was saying the new ambition is to get on the rig more. This afternoon I did just that and had some two way QRP contacts. The first was with John VE1BA down in Nova Scotia. He was running 2 watts into an FT-817. At the time I thought I was running 500mW's but the K3 was set at 5 watts. So that gave me only 153 miles per watt. We had a short but nice chat on 20 meters. I had a chance on the K3 to use the APF filtering as John's RST was 229. The APF worked great as he jumped out from the noise floor.

I then called CQ on 14.060 and Mike N0ZH came back to me with a 559 signal. He gave the the same signal report. It was not long before Mike started to fade in and out and very hard to read. So my QSO to Missouri came to a fast end. For this QSO the K3 was at 1 watt with a better miles per watt at 694 miles. I did hear KF5HGL calling CQ I started returning his CQ at 500mW's and climbed all the way up to 5 watts and he was not able to copying me. So either conditions were changing or it was not time for me to make a QSO into New Mexico.

N0ZH's shack