I turned on the radio right at 5:30 AM – 30 M dead. Just a few noise bands running down the waterfall… Solid S3-4 noise otherwise. Typical.
But there was this one hint of a trace… a smear. A few pixels. What could almost be a trace in the waterfall… I tuned over and listened close – sure enough, there was somebody in there, right down nestled in the noise.
I turned on diversity: combining my main end-fed wire in one ear with the low-noise receiving antenna in the other. Images that are slightly out of phase create a 3D image in your brain. It’s like going from mono to stereo on music – the world opens up. Weak signals resist fade and QRM just a little better. Diversity might pull him up out of the noise…
But he was gone.
Did he turn it over to another? Nowhere to go, no other signals on the band, so I wait. And there it is again! I make out a few letters… A few words out of a sentence…
And it hit me: I recognize that fist! That’s Don—my friend Don! In my book, I used his call in QSO examples.
Then confirmation: I hear his call float up out of the noise…
Don used to live in Colorado, then moved to Virginia with his XYL a year or two ago. It was a great move by all accounts, but Don had been the informal hub of an impromptu group of bug-slinging friends who got together and chatted regularly. But after he moved, the hub was gone, and the group slowly dispersed. Bottom line: Don and I don’t QSO very often anymore. Our schedules and paths just don’t coincide.
So, he was really weak, but nothing ventured, right? I waited – finally heard a TU – and gave a call…
Well, we managed to exchange “339” RSTs. And that first “3” was generous. Heck, he came “all the way up” to 349 on peaks. Copying, or as Thomas Edison once put it, “imagining” a few words…
So, we kept it short. “Best to the XYL,” “Have a great day,” “CUL.”
Perfect.
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