Antenna here is a wet noodle
Had an interesting/frustrating near-QSO today that I couldn’t complete, but that was just the end of a very long day (literally). It’s too bad because I had a productive 3 day meeting in Pickering, Yorkshire, England - but the return home had some travel-headaches (which included this near QSO).
Here’s my day…
- wake up in the U.K. at 4:30 A.M. to catch a 6AM flight from Leeds to Amsterdam
- layover in Amsterdam followed by a ~9 hour flight to Minneapolis
- my bag doesn’t arrive in Minneapolis
- my connection was too tight, so I miss my flight to Des Moines
- finally get to Des Moines at 5pm central time, NorthWest says my bag was misrouted
- exhausted, I start my ~40 minute drive home (19+ hrs of travel at this point)
- accident on I-35 has things to a crawl, so I take the back roads
- turn on the Icom 706-MKIIG to hear a guy (GØREK) on 20m from Yorkshire of all places.
I made a few attempts to work Darren, but conditions just aren’t quite good enough to make it through the QRM and noise. I’m still not convinced that my mobile HF setup is fully functioning (I think my High Sierra Sidekick needs some additional grounding).
Ever the optimist, I think “oh well, I’ll give him a call and let him know that I was in his neighborhood this morning once I get home”. That was the idea anyway. When I tried to call the guy, no luck. I’m fairly certain that the cheap RadioShack coax is either flaky or has a bad PL-259 (naturally, that’s the “temporary” section purchased in a hurry that was never replaced).
Well, back to the bright side… hamfest this weekend in Cedar Rapids… tower work will start soon… got a shipment of rotor cable today from Jay @ ArraySolutions….won’t be long now.
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