"From Fishing to Farmers Markets" ....news & events, issues & ideas

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

 
Trolling for DX and Albacore

In addition to our ham schedule with Brian on Pitcairn Island, we regularly talked with Gary K7WQE in Seattle. Gary is a lifelong friend of Steve. They sat for their ham licenses together in high school hence the sequential licenses of Steve, K7WQD, and Gary, K7WQE. That was an attention getter on the air. We developed a loyal fan club that monitored our sideband QSO’s with Gary, twice a week for many months while we fished for albacore in the South Pacific. In addition, Gary telephone patched us to our families in Seattle and Lopez Island, WA. Our best propagation was in the early evening on twenty meters sideband (14.260-80 kHz). Many times the ham station in Antarctica was sending telephone patches at the same time and their transmissions would bleed across a lot of bandwidth and wipe us out. Our DX club in Washington State had a 160 meter contest and we were able to give them maritime mobile contacts from way down under which helped their contest score. It was the last and only time I talked to Morry on the air. He was the first ham I had shared the “good code is like jazz” concept which elicited a wide conspiritorial grin.

Labels: Our onboard ham station with N7LHJ (K7TU now)

- posted by Holly @ 9:13 PM