W2LJ QRP .... Do More With Less

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Bands were crappy yesterday

Posted: 20 Mar 2017 09:32 AM PDT
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Saturday was a very busy, busy day for me. I was determined to do "not
much of anything" on Sunday, as a result of that busy-ness. It was still
chilly in the basement; so I brought the magloop upstairs to do a little
experimenting

First off, in my mind, the loop has proven itself as a viable performer on
20 Meters. I have made several trans-Continental and trans-Oceanic QSOs
with it. However, I have not used the loop much on 40 Meters, or any of
the other bands at all, if I remember correctly.

That said, I was itching to log some QSOs, so I started out on 20 Meters,
where my previous success had been. I was disappointed as I didn't hear
many signals; and the ones I did hear were weak and watery. On the bright
side, I was able to find the "sweet spot" on the tuning capacitor as easily
as I did before and it was pretty easy to bring the SWR down to about 1.2:1.

So I hopped to 40, 30 and 17 Meters, respectively. On each band I was able
to find the "sweet spot" on the tuning capacitor with ease. The background
noise would peak very easily and some careful tuning back and forth
resulted in very respectable SWRs on each band. But again, 17 and 30
Meters seemed to both be pretty dead.

40 Meters had a few loud signals; but it seemed everyone I heard was
already in QSO. I wasn't able to hear anyone calling CQ. Because of that,
I called CQ on both 20 and 40 Meters. No answers on 40 Meters, but there
was a very weak answer on 20 Meters. I could tell that a station was
calling me; but I just could not pull them out of the background noise.
Whoever that might have been, I apologize.

In all I spent about 45 minutes playing around, mostly just band switching
to see how quickly I could tune the loop after band/frequency hops. Even
with the 6:1 reduction drive installed, it was not long at all before I was
ready to go after making a change.

Here's an RBN map of where my CQs were being heard:


Disappointed by the band conditions, I headed down to the basement shack to
see if perhaps it was the antenna instead of the band being dead. Nope -
the Butternut HF9V and the W3EDP weren't hearing any better, if at all.
Just another one of those days of when you want to get on the air; but
there's just not much doing.

72 de Larry W2LJ
QRP - When you care to send the very least!