Speaking of callsigns which are hard to decipher, my worst experience came
back in the late seventies (when I was at college in Arkansas) that I took
a trip up to visit a buddy at the University of Missouri in Rolla, MO
. Jeff was not a ham, but had hung out with K5GO and I and had absorbed a
lot of "contesting culture" at the original N5DX so he knew I'd be
interested in trying out the club station, particularly since it was ARRL
DX weekend.
The UMR club station was (and still is) W0EEE which was equipped with a
Drake C-Line, SB-220 and (among other antennas) an 80M flat top dipole
stretched between two 160' campus power station smokestacks. Man, I could
hardly wait.
It didn't take long before I came to discover how difficult it was to get a
callsign full of "Es" through a 80M CW pileup. Signal strength was not the
issue - the callsign simply had no "inertia" to it. Sending the call
normally simply did not work. The only thing that worked was "di dah dah,
dah dah dah dah dah, dit (pause), dit (pause), dit". It was humiliating...
After two hours, pizza sounded a lot better than low band frustration.
Dave/K8CC
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