3 February 2025, PM edition
I went back on 12m this evening to explore the ether and make new friends far from Wake Island. Tonight went very well in some regards and left room for improvement in others. Where things went well was in the decent propagation. While there was some QSB to deal with, I was hearing stations quite well. Most notably hearing more stations in England for a nice change. France also made a stronger showing than previously experienced.

What did not go so well was an uptick in duplicate calls. Now that can be caused by a variety of reasons. I understand that people want to make sure they are in the log. I just question things when it seemed to me that if we had a solid QSO there should not be a reason to dupe. I am not on their end though and perhaps they are dealing with QRM and have trouble hearing my reports. Out of the 260 QSOs, 10 were dupes. Again, not a big deal, but when I am trying to offer as many QSOs out when I am on the radio, I look at those as 10 lost opportunities to put other calls in the log. Since I log with pen and paper and later transpose it to a spreadsheet I rarely catch a dupe when it happens.

The other part that makes that much more difficult to manage is when people call on top of your conversation before it is over. Listen, listen, listen is a vital part of operating that radio. This also goes to when I ask for a specific prefix or suffix and then a handful of stations, that nowhere nearly sound like what I asked for come in blasting their callsigns. It is generally not a good practice and will likely put you to the back of the line. And since I seem to be on a rant; that I promise will end very quickly, I might as well mention the partial callers. Stations that only transmit part of the call, over, and over, and over I generally ignore. Again, the best practice is to state your full callsign. Occasionally I admit I do answer those partial calls if I need to get them out of the way, but if they don’t respond because they are too busy saying the partial call, over, and over, and over… You can bet I will find other stations to work with.

While all that was happening, my friends in Japan waited patiently for me to work the EU stations before the band closed, which I very much appreciated. Since Japan is relatively so close to Wake, they almost always come in as a strong S-9 signal and can easily blow away weaker stations in Europe. As soon as the band showed signs of fading after 0900z I opened the door to everyone and was able to work many JA stations efficiently.
Next week I will get my CW key out and give it some much needed exercise. I hope to catch you on air then. 73, Allen