I haven't called CQ for a long time on CW except in contests. Mostly I have just responded to DX calls with a super short "5nn TU" and that's it. But this Saturday I heard a presentation at the
Norwegian Ham Meeting by Roland, SM6EAT about a Swedish initiative to increase CW activity. It is called
Scandinavian Open CW Activity (SOCWA) and it has at present 452 members from
Scandinavia in a wide sense of the word. It really got me interested in improving my CW skills.
So now I have started to call CQ SAX and have had my first long CW QSOs for years with SM and OH.
It is also amazing to look at the reverse beacon network and watch your own CQ being reported almost in real time from various Software Defined Receivers with CW Skimmers. Below is the result of the two CQs I have sent these two last days.
Hello Sverre,
ReplyDeleteyou're absolutely right:RBN is a great tool.
I like it myself, since it does not need any
special modes to check out actual propagation,
but comes along for free, when calling CQ in CW
or any of the other supported modes.
It gives you a direct feedback where and how strong your signal was received ( and thus how much lower power would have been still copied sucessfully ) - but it's kind of mixed blessing.
The immediate, automatical spotting of any station, local or DX, makes it more and more unlikely to be one of the first to discover some rare DX, very often the only chance to make
a QSO with QRP(p).
BTW. guess, you know the special skimmer for
scandinavia:
http://www.voacap.com/skimmer/index.php
It allows the results from two scandinavian skimmers to be sorted by speed/SNR or whatever.
72/3
Peter/DL3PB
Hi Peter,
ReplyDeleteYes you're right - every new tool has its advantages and its drawbacks. Thanks for the tip for the Scandinavian skimmer, I didn't know about that.