White Wale Harpooned
Forgive me for the terrible subject line. It was unavoidable.
It took ten months but I finally made contact with my ancestral homeland, Wales, last week.1
I’m not sure why it took so long. When 10 meter conditions were better last winter, I heard the occasional phone operator from Wales. I never got through their pileups, but, honestly, did not try that hard because I figured they would always be possible.
After the local noise took over HF in the spring and digital became my primary focus, there was a Welsh operator on FT8 nearly every day, always calling CQ NA. I’ve chased him dozens (hundreds?) of times without ever getting a call back.
Rarely, I would see other Welsh ops on the bands, with the same result. I began to wonder if my signal skips right over the entire country.
Tuesday night I had a nice run on 30 meters going when a VK station with a GW/ prefix popped up. In between other contacts I chased him for about 20 minutes before he finally called back to me. I held my breath as we went through the cycle; I’ve had many potential ATNOs call back once then disappear. We worked through the sequence without issue and I was finally able to color in Wales on GridTracker. Huzzah! The LOTW confirmation already came through, so Wales is done and dusted, as they say.2
Just a few minutes earlier I got Kazakhstan for the first time, so two ATNOs in less than half an hour. I also got Alaska in that run, and this KL station verified so I’ve completed my digital WAS.3
For good measure, Wednesday night I had a QSO with another Welsh op on 30 meters. Perhaps I should have been focused on that band all this time.
That makes four ATNOs in a week. Before that, my most recent new ones came on June 30. Before that it had been 29 days. Maybe another sign conditions are improving?
My antenna was unplugged most of the weekend, more because we had guests than any bad weather. The next few days look a little gnarly for storms in central Indiana, so it may remain unplugged for a bit.