KC0W is out on the road doing his "Cows over the World CW DXpedition". This morning I flipped on the rig and heard V73NS on his usual 7.035 and I looked at the DX world map in DXLab suite and saw a couple other blips listed
One was T32TV in East Kiribati on 40M SSB (the red dot ENE of the blue dot) and the other was Tom KH8/KC0W (the blue dot) burning up the band. I don't do SSB DXing so I focused on KH8/KC0W.
My band noise was -106 dBm and he was peaking as high as -86 dBm. Mercifully the static was low and the band pretty well settled with A at 4 and K at 1.
The lightning map I use is real time and you can watch the strike on the map and it often corresponds to the static crash you hear. Sometimes you can use this this visual/audio correspondence as a propagation tool.
His sigs were nice and strong
You can see the relative intensity of his signal on the waterfall below the 7.021 slice, and the corresponding skimmer signal next to the 599. The pileup was minimal so I figured were he was listening, up 1.4 and gave him a call and was rewarded with immediate success, a nice 40M band fill.
I'm not super big on bandfills but I do like 80M 40M and 30M bandfills. I'm going to be looking for this cat on the rest of his itinerary. He is a good op with good ears. Some interesting places are scheduled. Time to get ready for work
73 W9OY
