Ha ha, you are stupid!

I've been very interested - and surprised - with my recent ultra-low power WSPR activities.  As I speak, my home delta loop is running 100 microwatts - and getting spots - after an experiment at 500 microwatts earlier in the week.  From the beach, 50 microwatts is doing the trick.

Yesterday, I thought I might make a visit to the WSPRnet chat room to try and encourage more super-QRP experiments.  If you've never been there, it's a very strange place, populated over years and years by the same, very few handful of people, throwing aimless and often cryptic messages at one another.  It's a bit like a gang of kids, hiding under the stairs and talking about naughty things.

Here's how (in reverse time order) my comment was made, and the first comment (red) it attracted:

WA2ZKD rather threw me for a moment, until I realised the many - and entirely incorrect - assumptions he'd made in jumping to make me appear as though I was, well, a bit dim and/or dishonest (he later says this wasn't his intention - after the errors were pointed out to him.)

The wrong assumptions were:

(1) +7dBm is the power output report he saw when he looked my MW1CFN callsign up on some WSPR database or other.  But this wasn't the callsign I had used for the 50 microwatt experiment at the beach.  

(2) If he'd seen the words 'last night', this should have been enough to alert him as to his error, because he took WSPR results from the following afternoon to make his comment.

(3) A WSPRlite can only be set at fixed power levels down to 5mW.  With an attenuator fitted, there is no way to send the true power output to the world.  Even had WA2ZKD looked up MW6PYS - my daughter's callsign - instead, he still wouldn't have seen a true power report, but a value 30dB above what was actually feeding the antenna, because of this limitation.

(4) He assumed I was either incapable of understanding and calculating power, or else deliberately misleading people.  I am not known amongst those who know me for either of those two tendencies; quite the opposite.

So, in his rush to 'correct' my understanding of the world, WA2ZKD made a remarkable series of incorrect assumptions whilst also making himself, and not me, look silly.

Ah, well!  That's ham radio and angry old  men for you...