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Amsterdamned

Yeah I know – I said I would let the FT5ZM chalice pass from me. But this morning I needed to get out of the living room because the XYL hosted a small meeting. So I fired up the rig and the small amp. And looked for some FT5ZM signals. And found one on 21 MHz CW. The signal was not too strong but quite OK. I called a few times and then he went away. Not by QSB but what seemed to be an abrupt QRT. Shortly after, in the order of maybe one or two minutes if that long, he CQed again on the same frequency but the signal was… a tad stronger? Sounding less DX? Anyway it wasn’t the same to my ears. I was the first he came back to after this brief pause. WFWL applies, but it wouldn’t surprise me to get Amsterdamned on this one with a NIL.

Then ten meters CW. Quite easy, even with the tower down and ‘only’ 500W. Five elements on 0.8 lambda did the trick. After that I tried 10m SSB but gave up pretty fast. I used the Reversed Beacon site to look for possible other CW frequencies. What’s that you say? Me a lame ass DXer? Guilty. I might have a problem with people hopping spots and not tuning in between during a contest, but obviously this is something else.

There was one RBN spot on 17m but it showed a very low S/N figure. But not yet spotted on the cluster. Aha! That might be just my luck. Sure enough, the DX was audible. Barely deflecting one block on the LCD S-meter but I’ve logged weaker DX. ‘CQ FT5ZM FT5ZM UP’. I listened up but no one came back. At least: I didn’t hear anyone answering. What followed was more than twenty times ‘CQ FT5ZM FT5ZM UP’ while I tried sending up from 800Hz to a few kHz up and anywhere in between. I didn’t have a clue where to send because no one came back. Come to think of it, I didn’t try calling simplex. There seemingly were no other callers so it wouldn’t trigger a lid-copfest. Anyway he was just CQing in my and everyone’s face until he came back to a SM3. I quickly scanned and found someone sending ‘…NN TU’. But even there he CQed in my face and it was only a matter of seconds until it happened:

SM3CCM-@   18081.4 FT5ZM    CQ CQ CQ - 3 UP      1009 29 Jan
RI1ANT     18081.5 FT5ZM    LSN 18084.1          1009 29 Jan

So it was SM3CCM whom he worked. Game over. Soon after this cluster spot a pile up developed and I decided to quit. This WARC band vertical really is not worth much. I already figured that out but this confirmed my hunch.

The signal on 12 CW on the other hand was pretty good. I felt it might work but then two things happened. First off some moron was tuning his amp right on top of the DX. That’s the reason why I avoid these DXpeditions. This barbaric misbehaviour makes me want to shove an entire yagi into this idiot’s rear body cavity and then take as long as he does to tune my big amplifier. Don’t tell me all this is not on purpose! Can one really be this clumsy by accident? Anyway the pig’s signal eventually went away. Back to FT5ZM until:

R7CA-@     24893.9 R1CN        up    ne rabotaut oni simplex
F5JGA      24894.0 R1CN        stop
SQ5LTL     24894.0 R1CN        :) smart
R1CN       24894.0 R1CN        ARE YOU CRAZY ???

R1CN or at least and most probably someone else using this callsign decided to wipe away FT5ZM under an S9+++ signal repeating this callsign for a few minutes on end. By this time the meeting downstairs ended and I had heard enough retarded operators. It was time for lunch and some decompression.

I’m anxious to see if the 15m QSO was genuine or a pirate. Where is that online log anyway?

I was just about to post this late in the evening as the online log became available on Clublog and there you go: 15 AND 10 CW IN THE LOG.  😉

 

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