VE3WDM (Mike): Snow day = radio time!!

Working the KX3

OQ5A setup

On Friday I was able to take the opportunity to get some well deserved radio time in. Most weeknights when I get in from work and get the "house stuff" done I find I'm just to tired for the rig. On Friday I was able to fire up the KX3 and try my hand at some QRPp operationing. I was scanning up and down 20m's and found OQ5A from Belgium calling CQ. I adjusted the KX3 to 100mW's of power and gave OQ5A a go, he came back to me and with just a few repeats all the contact info was passed along and the QSO is in the books. This contact  at 100mW's netted me a distance of  37,603 miles per watt. 
I emailed Greet to let him in on some of the station info at this end. He was surprised I was only using 100mW's of power into an attic dipole to boot. Now here is the funny thing about propagation with 100mW's I tried to contact K0DNG in Kansas City Missouri and it was a huge struggle. I was going to up the power but Dennis was sending his 73s to me and moving on to calling CQ again.


Finally I saw on my Maclogger's cluster a spot for W0RW/PM now the cluster showed this to be in Indonesia. He was very weak and kinda in and out and there were other station trying to contact him as well. I topped up the KX3 to the 5 watt level and gave him a go. He came back to me and gave me a respectable report.  Now I thought there was something fishy about this cluster spot showing it as an Indonesian contact. I tripped off to QRZ.com and found out that PM stood for (in this case)pedestrian mobile!!  Paul was in Colorado which is a not even close to Indonesia...(this is my high school geography shinning through) but it was great making contact as I have read on many blogs about Paul and his pedestrian mobile adventures.