Wednesday 20 August 2014

Unexpected surprises – Cambodia on JT65



I saw John AE5X blogging about working Cambodia and his concern about whether the person was legit.

As luck would have it yesterday I was playing with JT65 on 20m and I saw XU7AEU calling CQ. I was quite surprised to see such a rare entity using such a slow mode. However believing in the motto “work first worry later” I called in reply, the first 2 calls where in vain, I was swamped by the stronger European stations. I reverted to “Plan-B” I called slightly higher up in the band and that worked, the rest is history.

I looked up Alex XU7AEU on QRZ.com

I think I am extremely lucky to be in the right place at the right time.

Quote from QRZ.com:  XU7AEU

I will be in the Kingdom of Cambodia once again between the 19th and 28th of August 2014 operating from my usual QTH (our office roof in downtown Phnom Penh). After the lightning strike in July i'm still using the Yaesu FT-817 into a 20m dipole. I have brought more dipole wire so i'll be stringing up some other bands as soon as I can.

By shear chance I caught him on day 1 of his stay. It also shows the value of using JT65 with QRP and less than optimum antennas.

And if that is not enough, he used LoTW 



1 comment:

  1. Hello Pierre, a really nice catch on JT65. Both JT65 and JT9 are ideal to use with a QRP station if you want to DX. My digital contacts in 2014 are all with the FT817. I'm really surprised what I worked, even some new ones. 73, Bas

    ReplyDelete