Last Friday (March 30th) I was off work for a company holiday. I didn't have anything to do so I ended up spending some time playing radio. I decided to stick to the FT8 digital mode and had a lot of new experiences!
I started out on 15m then moved to 17m, 20m, and then worked 1 station (CA2CEV - Chile) on 10m. That was the first digital contact on the 10m band for me! That new mode/band excited me and got me to thinking about 30m. At some point, I thought that I had tested the SWR on my Maxcon dipole on the 30m band and found it to be unusable. I must have just dreamed that situation up because upon checking it again, I found it to be high but the FTDX1200's built-in tuner was able to tune it flat with ease! So I started working 30m FT8. There was plenty of activity since only digital modes are allowed on that band.
Since I worked 10m and 30m FT8 for the first time, I thought "why not try 6m?" So I gave it a shot and worked another station in Georgia on 6m! I think that was my first contact on 6m (other than the one time I used a 6m FM repeater)!
I bounced around those bands before moving to 40m and then 80m! All-in-all, I worked 52 stations over 8 bands (6m, 10m, 15m, 17m, 20m, 30m, 40m, and 80m)! I even worked Turkey for the first time!
The countries I contacted included:
- USA
- Brazil
- Argentina
- Canary Islands
- Netherlands
- Slovenia
- Italy
- France
- Chile
- Puerto Rico
- Mexico
- Bolivia
- Canada
- Asiatic Russia
- Turkey
The impromptu FT8 Marathon was a lot of fun and I also got enough stateside contacts to earn my QRZ United States Counties Award (100 Counties Mixed) and the Grid Squared Mixed Digital endorsement!
73 de KG4LST sk
73 de KG4LST sk
No comments:
Post a Comment