Topband: Boring Report

[Lee K7TJR]

Tree, you are right about the QSB being different at different locations. As you know I am about 75 miles Southeast of you and I was there when you were working those european stations. I listened as you worked DF2PY  and was able to tell when you could hear him and I could not during deep fades. Converesly I could hear him Q5 sometimes when it appeared you could not. It is also pretty plain that some ops cant here them at all but transmit anyway. I worked SM5EDX right after you did and the QSB continued. I also worked the OZ1 and the GM0 with the same results. So far my timing to work Wolf has just not been right as I have heard him for 2 nights also.  I am only using the 90 foot top loaded TX vertical with 60 radials for RX as the farmers have not finished using the fields around me so I can put up the real RX antennas. Hope they hurry up. The Orion transceiver is doing a great job on top-band RX and comfortably feeds the Titan amp to 1500 watts. Interestingly enough I also had a failure of my TX antenna recently . During some high winds here a very small piece of radial wire deposited itself and a Tumble weed right across one of my guy wire insulators shorting an extra length of guy wire to the antenna after arcing through its insulation. I finally ran around the guy wires with a small neon bulb while transmitting 5 watts until I found the hot wire. I found the reason for the failure  by using binoculars. The resonant frequency only dropped about 100 Khz but it sure threw off the VSWR.
Looking forward to more pile-ups...     Lee K7TJR Oregon