John, WA6L, wrote: "... I have had many, many contacts with other QRP stations. This has been in contests sponsored by the NAQCC, ARCI, and other QRP organizations. Who is "doing all the work" when two QRP stations contact each other over a long distance?
I have had some QRP contacts where the other station has shown incredible patience and skill in pulling my signal out of the mud, and I am very grateful for those excellent operators. However, that is not the norm." ------------------------ I've had some occasions when the other signal showed true skill in pulling a very miniscule signal from me out of the mud, much to my surprise, when I was running several hundred watts into a gain antenna! QRP produces weak signals more often than QRO given similar antennas. What's interesting about it is how often a QRP power levels produce very nice "armchair copy" signals over huge distances. Frankly, I find one of the biggest uses for higher power is to avoid some fellow with a deaf receiver from jumping on my frequency in the middle of a QSO. It would be genuinely interesting to have some Ham band slices where the maximum power allowed at any time was 5 watts (or how about 1 watt?), even during contests. ...jus' dreaming here. For those unfamiliar with QRP DX, the NCDXF/IARU beacons* on 14, 18, 21, 24 and 28 MHz can be a real eye-opener. Often they are solid copy all the way down to 100 milliwatts half way around the world. Ron AC7AC * http://www.ncdxf.org/Beacon/BeaconSchedule.html _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: [email protected] You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
