Dan, you hit the nail on the head. If you fancy yourself a DXer you
need a station to cash the cheques your mouth writes, first and
foremost. If all you can afford is 100W and a wire, then you're a
fair-weather DXer (solar-wise).
Fortunately for me on 30m and below that wire is 60 feet long and
vertical. I got VU7RG on Day 1 on 40m CW! Now that I'm thinking
about it, I shoulda stuck a phasing coil in the middle of the 60
footer and used it on 20m !!
I had to
visit a better station to work the rare ones (my club's station, with
a Cushcraft X9 at 120' and a kW in the shack).
I've always resisted that. Even when I was in college and we had an
X9 at the club station (K2CC), it was the rig in my dorm room and a
wire or nothing at all. Just a personal handicap on the whole DXing
biz, but you're not going to see me whining on the cluster. Of
course, I was dorm hamming at solar max last time so I was knocking
down new ones (T30 comes to mind) on 10m with a 12 foot wire.
The U of MD station, W3EAX, has the big tribander stuck north right
now but that would have been just fine. I'd prefer to wait for the
next one...
I went with the Force-12 C31XR
and have not regretted it for a minute. 6dB over dipole on 20, 6.8
over a dipole on 15 and 7.4 over dipole on 10, 70 feet up, fed with
3/8" hardline and connected to an AL-1200 legal-limit amp and a
pretty good transceiver.
An achievable station for many hams if they're serious about the DX,
for sure. I'm still a renter, so a 70 foot tower is really out.
If you can't afford a good station or you've chosen to live in a
CC&R-restricted property that's fine; nobody's going to point their
fingers at you and laugh, unless you start to whinge when you can't
break through the piles of the bigger operations.
Exactly. Ultimately, it all comes down to the choices you make about
your ham radio activities, and I think you can do things even on a
shoestring budget. Heck, if I'd dropped a few hundred bucks on a used
amp before this operation went up, and put up my $70 beam for day 1
instead of day 3, I might very well have them in the log. I chose to
not make a huge deal of this one because I'm planning on DXing for
another 40 or 50 years... I put a little work in and built the beam
and put it up in a couple of configurations just to see if I could
squeak through.
I read that email on scarboroughreef.com ... you know, the profane guy
with atrocious spelling... and I wondered what piece of crap he was
trying to work BS7H on because I read his comments while I was hearing
them just fine here near DC on my delta loop at 25 feet, and I have
power line noise!
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