D60 what?

Having recently moved house, I find myself increasingly putting things where I then can't find them, and going off to places, having forgotten to bring something with me.  Or maybe it's just getting older!

Yesterday afternoon was gloriously sunny and a perfect balance between warm and cool.  I decided to set off for a local lake and play on 15m, which was wide open to most of the world.  

15m operation often causes my Raspberry Pi computer - if I'm using it - to crash.  This is because the short coax length - to minimise cable losses when QRP - is similar to a 1/4 wave radial on that band.  In addition, the short coax means I'm quite close to the antenna, where the field strength, even at 6W PEP, is quite high.  I was prepared for the problem this time, having previously wound a small ferrite to make a simple 1:1 choke balun, which I connected near the feedpoint.  Matching remained perfect at 1:1.

As is often the case in ham radio, things made in a hurry for a specific need become useful in the long-term!  A simple 1:1 choke balun for the vertical.

Of course, I forgot the USB battery pack!  I turned back, changed my mind, and went off to check how my shack-in-the-field was doing after a long period of not having visited.  It's an interesting site for radio, because it's very marshy, where the water table varies between about 1m below the surface in a dry summer, to forming a small pond and thus breaking the surface in winter.  An old well conveniently allows inspection of the water level!

Nice day for /P!

 

Having trundled across the fields to get there, I set up my 15m, 1/4 wave vertical and tried some SSB for a change.  Now that propagation is improving quite dramatically, people seem to be returning to actually talking to one another.  From a portable operations perspective, SSB is less of a burden in terms of not needing to carry and fire-up a computer, with its associated power source and accessories.

Anyhow, sitting there in the sun, I heard a fairly weak but very stable signal from D60AC.  Hmm.  I had no idea where that was.  Well, I gave him a call on all of 6W PEP, and he heard me first time.  Then I looked up where he was - the Comoros islands - at 8570km!  

Wow!  How many would laugh at the suggestion that was possible, especially without any long path/grey line enhancement?