Back in July 2023 I had a nice DX QSO when I chased Paul @VK3HN who was activating a summit.
That chase was a challenge for both of us: I used my KX3 at 5 watt and simple EFHW wire installed in the backyard of my summer house in a village. Regarding Paul, he used a homebrew simple crystal rig. We were very lucky to meet on air for that difficult long path QSO.
I described the QSO here.
The indoor setup
Two years later it’s Easter holidays and I’m spending some days at my father in law apartment, as he requires some care.
As I have described here in the Reflector before, I use to grab my SOTA gear and install it in my small bedroom, just for the fun of chasing some SOTA and POTA in my free time.
The wall in my room is oriented West, and all I can do is to deploy a wire indoor, around the window, in the shape of an ugly inverted U, hanging it with some clothes peg.
Can you spot the red wire crossing the window frame in te top side?
The wire is roughly 5 meter long and is connected to my ZM-2 manual tuner. I add another 4m wire as a counterpoise zigzagging on the floor. In the end this is some sort of distorted bent GP antenna, with an unknown pattern.
The apartment is in the 6th floor. I don’t know what the interaction of the antenna with the window frame and the big iron water heater is, nor I know what the wall attenuation is like.
To my surprise, I chase a few EU activators on mornings (they are in the opposite direction of my room!) and some times I chase some NA in the afternoon, as you may guess, with low reports.
Sure the unobstructed views outside the window explain how can my resulting tiny signal travels towards the ionosphere when exiting my room.
The v.2 DX QSO
After my first QSO with VK3HN, I had seen a few spots from him in Sotawatch but I couldn’t meet him on air again. To date…
This morning (April 19th) I woke up and have a watch at SOTAWatch. There he was Paul, CQing from VK3/VS-046 in 7 MHz CW. Mmm, it would be great if he QSYed up to 14 MHz.
I stayed on bed, the blinds still down, lazy to get up, and checked the cluster after a while.
I jumped out of the bed when I saw Paul was in 14.062 CW. Could it be possible?
I tuned my FX-4CR, battery powered, and waited to hear anything. Hey, there was a shy signal of an ending QSO and after waiting to confirm I could hear Paul CQing again.
Gosh! I called twice and Paul seemed to answer asking to complete my call again.
I raised my power to 10 watts to improve my chances and called him again. Bingo!
This time he answered and gave me a 339, while I gave him a 429 and greet him for such a DX. I was very excited and happy. I stayed on freq, and soon after our QSO it became difficult to keep on hearing him, as he was fading. Time of the day advanced and was playing against the Long path between us.
I could still catch some words and was waiting to hear some more EU chasers: it seems I was very lucky to catch him at the right moment before fading. That was an extraordinary chance.
The LP distance between us was 23007 Km / 14296 miles (IN82PU - QF12AC).
I guess Paul was using one of his nice QRP homebrew rigs, the so called multiband SP9. Sure he can confirm this later.
I wrote him an email to thank and acknowledge the difficulty of our QSO. He was kind to reply and send me a picture of his hand logbook. Isn’t it great to read your callsign written thousand of kilometer far from where you are?
Thanks Paul. Low power, silly indoor antennas, and activations carried out from underrated 1 pointers are sometimes blessed with such sort of nice contacts that will stay in our memory forever.
What it will be like for v.3 next?
72/73 Ignacio
