March monthly RaDAR meetup - After Action Report

Well, it was one of those days again. Seems to be the ARRL DX contest and no stateside station likes to respond to a local contact...? Worked the HFPack SSB frequencies according to schedule posted by Greg, but no QSOs made. Couple of times I had to move slightly up and down the band due to contesters on our scheduled frequencies. Even tried making a QSO with some foreign stations, but stronger stateside stations won out.

Also no luck with PSK or Hellschreiber on their respective frequencies for the bands that we were on per our schedule (as announced, I switched to those modes when you were changing to CW).

When it turned 1800Z with no QSOs made in 2 hours, I had to check my sanity, so I sent out an ALE Netcall, without luck on 14MHz and 18Mhz, but then on 21MHz I linked with KB3JAJ in Maryland, as copy/pasted below from HFLink.net, using 10W into the AlphaLoop, from Loc: EM34us. You can also see that KJ4AYT in Florida had good copy on me.
From that link to Maryland and the signal report from Florida, I thus have to conclude that I did send out a good signal, at least on 21MHz I had good propagation to the East and SouthEast.

On a sidenote, I was able to tune up on 10m band with AlphaLoop although it's specs don't suggest it goes that high. SWR was admittedly 4:1, but that should not mean that radiation efficiency is useless. Will have to give it another whirl sometime.

Was also on 28.800 MHz for the 10-10 Net at 1800Z, but no 10-10 stations heard, just some contesters nearby.

Seems like all of us had little luck making QSOs today. Hope we will have more takers during our contest next month. For that reason, I am not complaining about today's contesters! Big difference however will be that we will respond to every call and not just to some specific stations.

73 de Marcus NX5MK



[18:14:41]  KB3JAJ: [18:14:24][ 21.09 MHz ] [AMD][NX5MK][GREETINGS]
[18:14:54]  KB3JAJ: [18:14:24][ 21.09 MHz ] [CLEARED][NX5MK]
[18:19:08]  KB3JAJ: [18:16:56][ 21.09 MHz ] [LINKED][NX5MK]
[18:19:20]  KB3JAJ: [18:18:02][ 21.09 MHz ] [AMD][NX5MK][STAT]
[18:21:12]  KB3JAJ: [18:20:45][ 21.09 MHz ] [AMD][NX5MK][GREETINGS FROM LITTLE ROCK AR]
[18:21:22]  KJ4AYT: [17:20:46][ 21.09 MHz ] TO [NX5MK] De [KB3JAJ] BER 29 SN 07
[18:22:12]  KJ4AYT: [17:20:54][ 21.09 MHz ] TO [KB3JAJ] De [NX5MK] [AMD]GREETINGS FROM LITTLE ROCK AR BER 30 SN 11
[18:22:18]  KB3JAJ: [18:21:51][ 21.09 MHz ] [AMD][NX5MK][GREETINGS FROM LITTLE ROCK AR]
[18:22:38]  KJ4AYT: [17:21:48][ 21.09 MHz ] TO [KB3JAJ] De [NX5MK] BER 30 SN 12
[18:23:03]  KJ4AYT: [17:21:52][ 21.09 MHz ] TO [NX5MK] De [KB3JAJ] BER 29 SN 08
[18:23:16]  KJ4AYT: [17:21:59][ 21.09 MHz ] TO [NX5 KB3JAJ] De [NX5MK] [AMD]GREETINGS FROM LITTLE ROCK AR BER 29 SN 16
[18:24:21]  KJ4AYT: [17:22:10][ 21.09 MHz ] TO [KB3JAJ] De [NX5MK] BER 30 SN 10
[18:24:34]  KJ4AYT: [17:24:06][ 21.09 MHz ] TO [KB3JAJ] De [NX5MK] BER 27 SN 13
[18:25:28]  KB3JAJ: [18:25:01][ 21.09 MHz ] [AMD][NX5MK] HFN911 ALARMTEST NOT AN EMERGENCY [ DE NX5MK]
[18:27:54]  KJ4AYT: [17:27:36][ 21.09 MHz ] TO [KB3JAJ] De [NX5MK] BER 30 SN 12
[18:28:06]  KJ4AYT: [17:27:40][ 21.09 MHz ] TO [NX5MK] De [KB3JAJ] BER 30 SN 06
[18:28:11]  KB3JAJ: [18:27:43][ 21.09 MHz ] [AMD][NX5MK][WILL CHECK ON HFLINK IF MY MESSAGES CAME THROUGH 73 OUT]