W8L - International Lighthouse Lightship Weekend

2009

Great event this year. Without question the most contacts made in years. The bands (40 and 20 for the most part) were always open and there were always people who wanted to talk to us. FB! Lake Effecters put in a lot of air-time hours - about 24. Many thanks to Lyn, KC8GKH, Karen KC8UXJ, Fred KD8JIP, JD KD8DKZ and John KC8ULE for doing their things to support the activity. Pete, K8PT and Greg, KI8AF, of the Hiawatha club, were the primary movers and shakers this year (as usual). Several hundred contacts overall. John worked many hours of PSK31 and, being in the right place at the right time, also got to talk to lighthouse tour groups when they came upstairs. Special notices: Lyn and Jim, N8NAV (HARA) get best in show awards for their radio skills - it's a treat to listen to them patrol the bands for sure!

20 meter PSK segment was busy from Friday night thru Sunday noon. Look at the waterfall - signals on top of signals. This led to, at its worst, considerable QRM issues. In a real oddity, John found himself with honest-to-goodness PSK pileups going on. Very confusing!  Also some pretty aggressive behavior - someone invading your channel when you SK, people calling before you have a chance to CQ, etc. Pretty interesting experience for sure!

PSK really showed it's capability as an operating mode. All those skinny, light, ephemeral traces back there really do contain PSK data, and it is possible to make quality QSO's on traces you can barely see. 

Most interesting QSOs: 4 watt QRP qso from New Brunswick. QSO with someone who had been in the Air Force at KI Sawyer AFB many years ago. Got to tell him about the Ukranian plane on the ground there now for failing to pay it's bills for service in Texas. Helped someone trying out their new software-defined radio by checking for sideband generation as he ran the power up.

Worked Alaska, Scotland, Poland, Venezuela, Austria, England, Spain, Mexico, New Brunswick, British Columbia, Germany (a club station!), Slovenia, Russia. Like the story goes - a vertical radiates equally poorly in all directions - and, frankly, if that's poor performance, give me more!

Unusually, a great many stations were creeping around the band a few Hz at a time. I was beginning to doubt the new interface, but many others were right on frequency. One contact early Sunday was with a fellow in Washington state (3 hours earlier!) who had just flipped his old tube-model rig on and he warned that it tended to drift a bit for the first hour or so until it was all warmed up. Let's face it - on AM that just didn't matter. For PSK it can be an irritant for sure!