QST de N7GMT

I was reminded recently that there was an entry that wanted writing. Since it’s Thanksgiving weekend and the kids are in bed I might as well get it out of the way, eh? (Now if I were really on the ball, I would have a nice new laptop, with functional WiFi so I could sit in the living room with everyone else while I write this, but I’m an anti-MS curmudgeon, and it can be difficult to convince Linux and WiFi to behave themselves on old hardware.)

Anyway…

I read a post over at my mother’s site about men up on roofs. (Shouldn’t that be “rooves?” Oh wait, this is English; it’s not supposed to make sense.) No good deed goes unpunished, so I left a comment on her entry, which stirred up memories of a weekend not too far past.

(more…)

“Who?!” you ask.

“Wallis and Futuna.”

“… Weren’t they the neighbors that had that incident when someone ate a funny whelk?”

“Erm … no.”

Wallis & Futuna is a set of islands in the deep pacific, about half-way between Fiji and Samoa. The only reason I know this is because my obsessed friend, KE7JSM, called me about 22.30h t’other night; the conversation might have been something like …

“Wallis & Futuna on 20 right now!”

“You don’t say.”

“Get on 20. Wallis and Futuna is on. Right now.”

“And what are they doing there?”

“Not who; it’s a where.”

“Well, where is that?”

“I don’t know, but they’re on 20!”

Thus I can well imagine your confusion. Anyway, there was the nice Young Lady named Jan on 20-meters, having a quick chat with anyone who would chat, then she got down to business and worked as many stations as she could get while the band held.

I calculated from Wallis Island (Wikipedia has a nice map), where Jan said she was operating from, to my home QTH in UT: just over 5500 (statute) miles. She gave my 100W a generous 59, and I gave her 75W a 57 — completely subjective, because she was hardly moving the S-meter, but she was very easy to understand above the static and noise.

All that with the poor, droopy 80m horizontal loop that I’m replacing. Now I really wish I’d gotten that G5RV finished, so I could have done some A/B comparisons. Oh well. The price of procrastination.

At least I got the Q.