The past few days here in Shreveport have brought some pretty messy weather with plenty of lightening and thunder. Between all of the tropical storms in the gulf, one hurricane down south somewhere, and a front moving down from the north that has parked across the area, it has been an interesting week. And for the past couple of days, 10 and 12 meter propagation has been dead. 20 and 40 meters has been doing fairly well in the evening hours though. Tonight in fact was completely amazing!
I’ve always understood that good DX connects are completely possible without using high power and large directional arrays. But the conditions have to be just right for it to work well in both directions. I can hear distant stations often, but rarely does my signal make it back to them it seems. After all, I’ve got a rather simple station consisting of my Yaesu FT897D and a Jetstream Fan Inverted “V” Dipole that covers HF from 80-6 meters. It wasn’t actually originally configured to cover 6 meters, but I modified it with an additional span awhile back and it works nicely. The only optional piece of equipment is an LDG AT-897 tuner to smooth out the antenna characteristics a bit. I don’t run any amplification other than the stock 100 watts output offered by the radio.
So I was a bit surprised this evening when I saw RA0ADQ show up across my screen while doing some FT8 digital on 20 meters. Usually I check to find that the contacts I’m making are somewhere in the 800-1400 mile distant range from my station. When I ran this one through the check, it came back at around 6299 miles from my station. WOW. Ok I’ll bite on that hook. I doubt he will be able to hear me, but it never hurts to try eh? I hit the TX Enable button in WSJT-X and watched the sequence repeat a few times with no response. Just about the time I went to click the “Halt TX” button, his response came across the screen, showing up as a bright RED line among the yellows, greens and whites. I did a double check on everything to make sure I wasn’t mistaken. Sure enough he was responding to my CQ!! We exchanged signal info, then 73s and the whole thing was over. My logging window popped up for me to add details and just as easy as that, my first overseas contact happened.
From Shreveport, Louisiana, USA to Achinsk, Krasnoyarsky, kr. Russia, with only 100 watts of power and basically what amounts to a piece of copper wire hanging off of a 35 foot pole at the end of my house. Short path for that contact is 6304.9 miles. Long path is 18551.9 miles. So any way you slice it, it’s a very long distance. I do SO love this hobby!
Thank you Vladimir K. Smirnov / RA0ADQ. You’ve made my first overseas contact a fantastic one! My QRZ.com log has been updated. And I sincerely hope that someday we can try that again using Voice/Phone to connect. Peace and Blessings your way my friend and fellow radio enthusiast.
73,
David / N5ZDT
