Now that I’ve got my new radio shack up and running I decided to give my Icom IC-705 QRP rig an outing and see if I could work a distance of 2000 miles with 1w output.
This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while but, only being able to sit at the picnic table in the garden or in the summer wasn’t particularly conducive to a long stint on the radio.
For this challenge I decided to use FT4 or FT8, whichever was active on the bands. This is a great mode for QRP operations and can get a tiny signal through when other more traditional modes fail.
I used both my EFHW vertical for 20m/10m and my EFHW vertical for 30m that can also be tuned on most of the other HF bands too. This gave me most of the HF bands for the challenge.
Initially I worked a lot of stations in the 600-700 mile range, conditions weren’t brilliant and there was a lot of deep QSB.
My first notable distance QSO was with YO4DG near Mangalia Romania at 1383 miles, this equates to 0.72mW/Mile, my lowest mW/Mile achievement up until this point.
Not long afterwards I saw SV8DCY on the WSJTX waterfall, I wasn’t sure if he’d hear me or not but, I gave a call. To my surprise he came back and became the longest distance QSO for a short time. At 1485 Miles to Kalloni Lesvos Island, Greece this equates to a new low of 0.67mW/Mile.
I then went on to work a bunch of stations in the 1000 miles or less range for a while as conditions on the bands were up and down. It’s amazing how many times I got an answer from a station only for them to disappear completely before the QSO was completed.
The next contact of note was with CU3HN in the Azores, 1713 Miles at 0.58mW/Mile, a new lowest mW/Mile record set. it’s amazing how far you can get a signal with such a tiny amount of power.
RV6F in the Stavropol region of Russia was the next big mile marker, 1932 miles at 0.51mW/Mile. It took a number of attempts to get the QSO to complete as we kept losing each other due to the deep QSB that was between us on the 20m band but, with a little patience and persaverance we eventually got the QSO to complete and it was in the log.
At this point I decided to switch over to the 10m band to see if it had opened up to more than just Europe. When I checked earlier there were only European stations being heard, most being well under 1000 miles. Sure enough the band had indeed opened up and I was hearing stations out to the east that were in excess of 2000 miles.
After tuning up and listening for a bit my first call was to RL9F in Perm Russia. This was the one that I’d been looking for, 2084 miles at 0.47mW/Mile this was the one that could complete the challenge.
After a few failed attempts due to deep QSB we eventually got a complete QSO in the log finishing the challenge.
2000 miles using 1w is a lot of fun, frustrating at times when you’re being heard by stations on the east coast USA but, none are answering your reply to their CQ calls.
PSKReporter has proven invaluable, being able to see who can hear you makes a big difference when trying to eek out the last mile when using next to no power.
In total 31 stations were worked over a 9 hour period, not huge numbers but, for many an M0AWS call sign isn’t exotic enough to answer and so many of my calls to stations were ignored. Sad really.
You can view all the log entries for the 2000 Mile 1 Watt challenge on my WSJTX Log.
So, what next? Well I guess it has to be 3000 miles or more using just 1w from my trusty Icom IC-705.
More soon …