John Ferrell wrote:

An Interesting incident this past week:
A few days ago I was chatting with a friend on the telephone and
tuning through the 20m PSK-31 when I heard a 3 land call with a CQ.
Since most PSK contacts are a matter of a few keystrokes I answered
him. I needed to verify the SGC-237 tuner was working properly on the
30 foot vertical anyway. From that point I just had to share the QSO
with my buddy Bill on the telephone. It turned out that the contact
was Maritime Mobile off the coast of Angola Africa where he is the
Captain of a sea-going tug (220 Feet!) that re supplies oil drilling
platforms!

I keep hearing that it takes a beam antenna way up in the air and
lots of power to work DX. I was running 30 watts PSK into an end fed
half wave vertical that is a ground level.

I keep hearing that the problem with verticals is that they radiate
equally poorly in all directions...

Those Hams that complain that they cannot work HF because of antenna
restrictions could do the same with a flag pole antenna.

John Ferrell W8CCW

This is one of the appeals of PSK31..

You don't need much radiated power to work the world. The bandwidth
really is 31 Hz, after all.