My first CW contact... and using QRP too

Last night I went to bed and checked my twitter feed to see that MW0IAN had reported working W1AW/4 on 40m CW. I thought I would have a listen to the frequency that Ian had posted. Sure enough they were there and a good signal to me. I only had the FT-817 at the side of the bed into the attic dipoles mentioned earlier in the blog. I felt it was time to have a go and a simple 599 TU type exchange would be easy enough not to mess up. So I plugged in the palm mini paddles and had a go, sure enough first call with 5w CW I was receiving a M0? after another two sends of my call I received my report and thanks.

So it seems 2014 is finally the year to be brave enough to have a go at CW and even if I make mistakes I am taking part. This has certainly spurred me on to make more of an effort to get my CW going this year and I will make every effort to make a few more simple contacts before I start to progress on a little more. The bonus is I do not wake the house calling DX stations late at night.

There is one slight lie here, this is actually my second ever QSO using CW but the first was with G0RQQ and quite a few errors over a 1 mile distance  and pretty sloppy on my sending and receiving. So technically this is my first solo CW contact without the help or support of a good friend truing me and supporting with text messaging and 2m FM. Still I am happy to make my first foray into CW a QRP DX contact. I am still buzzing and will be having another go soon.

This is the humble bedside DX station, of course the microphone now lives in the drawer. :)


Comments

  1. VE9KK 20 January 2014 at 00:51

    Good evening, sounds great to have a rig at the bedside table and to boot to hit some DX with CW as well. Very nice job getting the bedside DX contact.
    Mike
    VE3WDM

    ReplyDelete

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