27 January 2025

I was recently persuaded to give 20m a try in the afternoon here. As you may have noticed I enjoy operating in the mornings or evenings to avoid the heat of the day. I do also like learning how the bands perform at different times of day so this was officially now an experiment that I had to see through. Will the band cooperate? It did to some degree I suppose.

After setting up at 03:30z I did a test call and noticed the SWR was way too high. Okay, what has changed? I was using the semi-permanent 20/40 dipole my friend Tom, NL7RR, had installed on his last trip to Wake. I checked my cable, the bullet connector between my cables, and the connector on the balun. All good. Then it hit me. You goof, your radio stores the last state it was in when you powered off last. While I was listening to 20m, my radio was still set for split and was transmitting on 12m from last night. An easy fix, and this time I remembered to turn the output power back up…

First in the log this afternoon was VK2WWV, Bret in NSW Australia (he’s got a great looking cubical quad on his QRZ page — check it out). Then Ku5B, Colin, in Houston, Texas. I took both of those contacts as a good sign for things to come and set up for split, five-up. As I braced for the pile to swamp me, something odd happened. A calm, collected, stream of manageable calls. This was an odd feeling for me. The calls this afternoon I could actually hear and quickly respond to because they were not jammed together. It was a nice, gentle pace, as people came on frequency to have their turn. It took me a while to drop my guarded caution and realize it was going to stay that way.

While most of my QSOs were with Japan, I did have a few VK, EA stations and a notable contact with Andreas, 5B4VL, in Cyprus. Well done. The final tally today was 198 contacts on 20m and that put me over the 4,000 QSO mark for the two months I’ve been on island. I have a little less than two months to go on this trip until I head home for a month for some actual time off to spend with my family. 73, Allen

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