Missed Opportunity

Memorial Day weekend is always busy for us. Family gatherings. Swim parties. Yard work. And so on. The Indy 500 is generally background noise to whatever we are doing, but despite living 12 miles from the track, it does not dominate our weekend. Throw in a couple thunderstorms and lots of family in the house, and the antennas were unplugged and radios put away most of the weekend.

Sadly it looks like I missed a nice opening on the bands. Reading through my fellow ham bloggers this morning, several noted that conditions were outstanding over the weekend. Or at least better than they have been.

Bummer for me.

Saturday evening I did have some free time and tried to play around with my collection of radios and antennas, but had little luck. I began on the back porch, with my POTA PERformer antenna and both the IC-705 and FT-891. The bands seemed very quiet and there were few signals to pick out.

I came inside, plugged into my main antenna, and was immediately blown away with signals. And noise.

Clearly I have done something to render the PERformer deaf. More experimentation to come, I guess. I am hoping to get some kind of wire in the backyard for morning and evening “porch portable” radio now that we seem to have finally shaken off spring.

The loudest signal of the night was W1AW/7 in Montana, with a nice pileup going. After a few minutes, though, she was obliterated by a station 2 KHz up. Which happened to be W1AW/0 in Connecticut. Of all stations to interfere with each other…

Two ATNOs sent over in this week’s LOTW upload: Taiwan and Cyprus, both on FT8. There were a bevy of stations from other new countries that I could decode Saturday evening, but I never got a call back from UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, or Moldova.

I fell into a dark rabbit hole last night, reading about how dire conditions can be when we are in the depths of the solar minimum. I really should have gotten into this hobby three years ago…