After finally getting my OCF dipole up in the air, I've been hoping to get some good DX. I had been catching a direct path to Japan on 12m FT8 and worked several stations there. Japan is good DX, but I wanted a new country. Something to show me that the wire was working better than the small Comet CHV-5x rotatable dipole I had been using tied to the fence post (which had been working surprisingly well).
On 10m FT8, I was decoding a lot of DX (thanks to solar cycle 25 kicking in). I worked some Japanese stations here too and then I started decoding DU6/PE1NSQ, Rick in the Philippines, with a pretty good signal. He was actually working a friend of mine John-KA4JON and sending RR73. I called him for some time and then got a reply! We worked the contact through to the RR73 and he's in the log! An all time new country for me and on the 10m band at that!
The Philippines is an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. It is situated in the western Pacific Ocean and consists of around 7,641 islands that are broadly categorized under three main geographical divisions from north to south: Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. The Philippines is bounded by the South China Sea to the west, the Philippine Sea to the east, and the Celebes Sea to the southwest. It shares maritime borders with Taiwan to the north, Japan to the northeast, Palau to the east and southeast, Indonesia to the south, Malaysia to the southwest, Vietnam to the west, and China to the northwest.
73 and Good DX de K4LST sk
