Like many folks chasing grid squares, I’m spending time on the digital modes. Yesterday was a fairly unusual day for me in that I was able to make contact with places that I usually don’t hear, most likely on the gray-line. Alaska and Hawaii were easy shots. I heard China and several Asiatic countries. The conditions continued at night as I was attempting to help a ham complete his 80-meter WAS. While that didn’t work out (we were successful on 30 and 40 meters), I was amazed to see DP1POL on, as well as RI1ANO, both in Antartica. I watched K1RI work RI1ANO (congrats Bob!), and I was lucky enough to work DP1POL. While propagation was great, conditions were brutal. The band was chock-full of well over S9 signals. Here’s what my waterfall looked like:
It was like that from 0100-0300 when I called it a night. Here was my exchange with DP1POL:
You can see a few retries were required to finally copy the signal. And the reward this morning was a LotW confirmation:
Every contact helps, including rare-ones like DP1POL. Russ KA1ERL and I keep trading places in the hunt.
