The One That Got Away, 2012 Version, Part One

I'm sure there will be other parts later, but this is today's story. Hopefully I can describe things so the non-hams in the audience will understand what's going on.

Yesterday my son invited us over for dinner, and I stuck around for a few minutes to help him with a computer problem. (Like many people who work in tech, I am the go-to guy for computer support for most of my family.) I got back home, read stories to the Igors, and decided to play a little radio before I went to bed.

I turned on the radio and tuned up to operate on the 40 meter band. 40 meters is an interesting band. During the day it's good for fairly short range communication, up to maybe 1000 miles. When the sun goes down if conditions are right you can get stations from a long way away. Sometimes that works to the hams' disadvantage, since parts of the band that hams in the Americas can use to communicate with each other are given over to high-power international broadcasters in the rest of the world. It can be hard to carry on a conversation when Radio Moscow is right next door, three times as loud as any of the hams. The situation is changing and broadcasters are moving out of the 40 meter band, which is a mixed blessing; if you could hear, say, Radio Moscow and knew it was broadcasting from a location in Kazakhstan, you would know that the band was open to that part of the world and you might be able to contact Central Asian hams in parts of the band available to them.

So there I was, just watching the readouts on the computer to see where the band was open. Several hams from the Midwest and South were talking to Latin American stations and a few East Coast stations were working Spain and England. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Soon after I saw this come up on the display:

ZS2ACP KR4RO R-19

"Hm," I thought. "ZS2? That sounds like a South African call." I did an Internet check and sure enough, ZS2ACP was listed as being in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Lucky KR4RO, I thought, but I figured if I can't hear the Venezuelans people are working, there's no way I can hear South Africa, especially if his signal into KR4RO's area has a strength of -19. (Closer to 0 is higher, and -24 is generally considered about the minimum signal strength for a contact. Sort of like stellar magnitude, except -1 is the highest you can get.)

I went off to try to contact an Alaska station I heard calling CQ. I didn't get him. It was my own fault, I forgot to set the transmit frequency correctly. After I figured this out, the South African call sign came up again. This time he was talking to a ham with the call N3XX - most likely in the mid-Atlantic states, though I didn't check. Out of curiosity I stuck around, and after N3XX was done transmitting I saw a faint signal indicator on his frequency.

Naaah . . . it couldn't be. Could it?

N3XX ZS2ACP RRR

There it was, the South African acknowledging contact with N3XX! That was a surprise, to say the least. I don't think I ever heard a signal from that far away back when I had a really good 40 meter antenna in Montana. The software said he was just over 10,000 miles away. Wow!!

I stayed on frequency, listened to the two of them complete their QSO (two-way contact), and decided, just to see what would happen, I sent a contact request:

ZS2ACP WA7KPK CN87

I listened. No luck. The signal was gone. Oh well, it was worth a shot.

I tuned around the band for a while, looking for a contact. The band was moderately busy, which meant I was getting lost in the crowd a bit. Lots of strong nearby stations, but all of them talking to other people. I decided to try a slightly different tactic. Louder, nearby, more readable stations show up as bright patterns on the signal display. I started looking for fainter ones.

I found one faint, barely perceptible pattern and decided to listen in to see if the computer could decode the signal. Since each message in JT65a takes a minute to send and decode, I had to wait about 40 seconds for the readout. It appeared on the screen, and my jaw dropped.

CQ ZS2ACP KF26

The last thing in the world I expected was to hear the South African station calling CQ ("Anybody out there want to cntact me?"). South Africa is by no means a rare country, but it's unusual to hear it from North America on 40 meters, and when it happens you often get a "pileup" - a crush of signals from people like me, all wanting a contact.

So of course I called him back.

ZS2ACP WA7KPK CN87

No reply, which is what I expected. Again, his signal disappeared.

So I went back to listening for weak stations and found him again on a different part of the band, working someone in the Midwest. After the contact he called CQ again, and I answered again, but he was gone.

That's about the time I called it a night and started getting ready for bed. I figured calling him was worth a try, and I would have been pleasantly surprised if he'd replied, but if you got all the stations you called every time, what would be the fun in that?

Consolation Prize

So as I said in the previous post I missed out on South Africa. I got a consolation prize, though. This afternoon in rapid succession I got a contact into Hawaii, plus another one into Japan.

Under the somewhat arcane rules governing ham radio awards, Hawaii counts as both a state (for the Worked All States award) and as a country (for the DX Century Club, where you try to get contacts with hams in 100 different "countries.") Same with Alaska. This means that since March I've worked something like ten states and three countries. You'd think Canada and Alaska would be easy contacts, but I haven't managed to get them yet.

A quick word about countries: somewhere there's a definition of what constitutes a country for award purposes, but it's been a very long time since I've read it. The list includes over 300 entities, including such "countries" as the Isle of Man, Scotland, Wales, the Galapagos Islands, Asiatic Russia (as opposed to European Russia), St. Pierre et Miquelon, the naval base at Guantanamo Bay and the headquarters of the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva - as opposed to the United Nations headquarters in New York.

I earned my Worked All States (WAS) award the last time I was on the air for an extended period of time and got something like 45 countries toward DXCC. I want to try to get WAS again, and to get DXCC this time. Both are doable, but can be tricky. With DXCC, once you get past the countries with large, active ham populations - maybe 50 of them - you have to start digging for the rest.

Stateside, the tough part is working the states that have low numbers of hams. Wyoming comes to mind, as do both North and South Dakota. I remember reading recently that there are about 1500 hams in North Dakota, of which maybe 10% are active on the shortwave bands. So, now that this post is over I'm off to participate in something called the Montana QSO Party, where hams from Montana are encouraged to get on the air so the rest of us can contact them. When I earned my WAS, I was living in Montana, and for more than one ham I was their last state for WAS.

And one final note: Guess which states have the highest numbers of radio hams? California has the most, followed by Texas, Florida, and . . . for reasons unknown to me . . . Washington. Yeah, not too many people need me as their fiftieth state for WAS.