AmateurRadio.com

Today’s bad news is that the toothache that I’d had for about a week hadn’t gone away this morning, and after my dentist took a look yesterday and tried one thing to fix it that didn’t work, this morning I made an appointment with an endodontist to see if I needed to have a root canal on that tooth. The folks in his office were nice and managed to get me a late-morning appointment, which meant that I’d work from home in the morning (the endodontist’s office is only about 10 minutes from home, so going all the way to work in Secaucus and coming back made no sense) then head to the appointment. (The other bad news is that I did indeed have the root canal procedure done. The procedure itself wasn’t so bad, but now that the anesthetic has worn off it’s pretty uncomfortable.)


As usual,  when I work from home I usually leave that packet cluster up and running, and this morning was no exception. I saw a spot for Charlie, VR2XMT in Hong Kong on 20m, which is another entity that I still needed to work. I’ve heard Charlie before and even tried working him but hadn’t had any success. While working on some emails for work on my laptop, I tuned to the spot frequency and heard Charlie’s very strong signal. I called him several times but wasn’t able to get through, so I turned down the volume a bit and kept listening while working. After a while it seemed that there weren’t as many callers, and in fact it got to the point where there seemed to be nobody calling at all, so I gave my callsign a few times in response to Charlie’s “CQ”, and he responded to “the station ending in Echo Bravo Kilo”. I figured that he might have been calling me so I called phonetically a few more times and sure enough, he was calling me. We exchanged 5×5 signal reports, I thanked him, and I had a new one in the log!


Unfortunately, Charlie doesn’t participate in Logbook of the World, but since this is an all-time new entity I would have been sending for a paper QSL card anyway, which I will get in the mail very soon. It’s always great to work a new DXCC entity, and it was especially great to have worked my 2nd new one this year within less than a week of working the previous one.