I just don’t seem to get it right with this one. FT5GA jinxed me!
Friday night, on 30m: what a mess! I just couldn’t bother, so I CQ’ed away myself.
Last Sunday, on 15m CW: good signal, heard them working a Japanese station and right away they were asking for JA only. JA JA JA.
Yesterday 17m CW. Good signals. But only NA NA NA. Then for 20 minutes or more, they were specifically asking for French stations. CQ F CQ F CQ F. After that, back to NA NA NA. Sure they work EU too, but not when I’m around… Or at least I don’t come around.
Yesterday 15m SSB. From all the jumping between 15m SSB and 17m CW, the rig lost its split setting. As a result of that I called simplex. On 15m SSB, there must have been one or two ON stations listening with the VFO simplex. Belgians alright, I could tell by the expressions they used (“up jong”). They immediately drew my attention with some aggressive yelling. Oops. I must admit I was a annoyed by this, because I already got aggravated by the fact that my SSB voice keying once again didn’t work. Just like RTTY, I only use this a couple of times a year. Just like RTTY, I need to fiddle with the Windows XP settings to get it right the moment I need to use it. It has to do with Windows only being able to play the WAV files run from N1MM through the default sound card. That needs to be the MK2R’s on board sound card but Windows seems to reset it to the sound card on the main board once in a while. I don’t notice this since I only use that shack PC for ham purposes. I changed this back and checked / changed a bunch of other things but it didn’t work. Running out of options, I rebooted the PC and then it worked. All this with FT5GA pretty loud on 15m SSB. CW always works – period!
But the best example of bad karma is this spot on the cluster yesterday:
KC3ET 18072.1 OQ5M Ur Qrmng FT5GA on 18073.9 1453
This can be filed under as a “WTF? moment”! How can I QRM almost 2 kHz away? And should this be the case, why send out this utterly obnoxious spot? Why not just call me, work me, and tell me? If sent properly, I copy a real CW conversation up to 32 WPM. I was a bit toppled by this at first. I don’t want to QRM someone. But I assumed that the guy had a problem because no one else complained. I asked ON4BHQ who was online the MSN instant messaging, to check it and he confirmed a clean signal and no QRM from me on the DX QRG. So KC3ET: get some CW filters and be a man, tell it to my face in stead of through this cluster spot.