Many evenings, around 10:30 PM PDT, I sit in my bed getting caught up with
my technical journals with my headphones on listening to folks QSO on 40
meters. I have a wire cut for 40 plus a counterpoise but the wires are
across the bookshelves of my room making them not too effective as
vertical radiators. I find listening to CW while reading very relaxing.
If I am working through a derivation of some long bit of an equation my
mind may not hear as much of the QSO but when I am done with the math the
CW comes back to the fore part of my brain while I read on. Nice way to
get ready to sleep. Thus, I think the answer to your surmise is yes,
there are a lot of folks listening but not sending. There is a key beside
the bed but I've yet to use it from that position. Maybe soon ;)
Kevin. KD5ONS
On Wed, 07 Sep 2005 09:53:35 -0400, Stephen W. Kercel
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Ralph says:
There is CW out there but sometimes the activity does
seem sparse.
************************
I'd wondered about that. I was completely inactive from July 1983 to
November 2004, and I've noticed that the CW bands seem a lot less
populated now than they did 20+ years ago. For example, last night as I
tuned across the CW end of 40 m I heard maybe 6 QSOs. Admittedly, the
geomagnetic activity has been high and propagation over the past week
has been actively stinking.
On the other hand, I wonder if the sparsity of transmissions is really
from fewer hams operating, or simply from fewer hams transmitting. I
expect that quite a few operators do what I do, listen without
transmitting until something genuinely interesting pops up. My reason
for suspecting this is that I repeatedly notice a remarkable phenomenon.
The band will seem very quiet, maybe 2-3 QSOs in a 20 kHz segment, but
then a rare (sometimes even not so rare) DX station appears, and a
pileup develops literally within seconds, and becomes massive no later
than the DX's second QSO. This happens too fast to be the effect of a
spotting net or computerized spotting, I can only conclude that many
operators are listening, ready to pounce when the moment is right.
73,
Steve
AA4AK
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