It's a Funny Old World

So as I often do I got up at 3:30 this morning to go to the bathroom, and stopped off at the radio to see if anyone was on. (This is one great thing about digital modes like JT65. You can turn the volume all the way down because the signal is delivered straight to the computer through an audio cable. I can operate without bothering anyone.)

Guess who was calling CQ?

The same Australian station that had swamped me earlier calling Gabon.

So we made contact and now I have something like three or four Australian contacts and one New Zealander, the last couple of which were with the loop.

Have I mentioned how much I am liking this loop? I may just take the previous antenna down.

The next step is going to be how to make the loop work better. I have two projects in mind:

1. Adding about 60-70' of wire to the loop to make it work properly on the lowest frequencies I intend to use.

2. Raising the whole shebang to 20-30 feet in the air. At least up to a point, the higher up the loop is, the better the signal gets out.

The first should mostly be straightforward. The second will require a bit of ingenuity. Any ideas? (I have a couple that will require PVC pipe and sandbags.)

Oh, and I'm tired at work again, and once again it's my own darn fault.

Yemen

The ham radio world is abuzz, pretty much literally, with the news. An 11-man crew has set up a station in Yemen, specifically Socotra Island, and will be operating there for the next couple of weeks.

It's hard to describe how big a deal this is. Yemen and North Korea are the only two countries that currently do not allow their citizens to become radio amateurs, so contact with those two countries is almost nonexistent. Yemen is at or near the top of almost every DXers "Most Wanted" list. Socotra Island is the #1 most wanted location in the Islands On The Air program.

This is BIG.

At the moment I can't hear the Yemen station, but I can sure hear the "pileup" - the gaggle of stations trying to work him. Mostly I stay out of pileups because the "big guns" with their kilowatt signals and huge moose-antler antennas are way louder than I am.

So this time I plan to be sneaky.

According to the crew's web site they plan to use three modes: Morse code (CW), phone (SSB) and radioteletype (RTTY). Morse code generates huge pileups that I'll never get through. Phone is worse. (I'm not at all sure how I worked the French special event station, but their pileup was nothing compared to this.) So I'm going to wait until they are operating RTTY at a time and frequency favorable to North America, and . . . then wait my turn. But there will probably be fewer stations trying to work Yemen on RTTY, so my chances will be better.

Or I may just go chase the easier stations.

Just one more thing: yes, radioteletype is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. When surplus teletype equipment started becoming available after WWII, enterprising hams built modems to convert the electrical signals the teletype uses to audio and put them on the air. When people started experimenting with hooking sound cards up to ham radios, it didn't take long to create RTTY decoders. I've always thought RTTY was an interesting idea, but not interesting enough to buy and convert a teletype machine. Now all it takes is a piece of software. Isn't living in the future wonderful?