E4X winding down and soon QRT

Originally posted on 'The wet string chronicles' in June 2010.

Approaching 75,000 QSO’s in their log and less than 12 hours before they go QRT. The E4X operation will soon be a thing of the past.

Pushing 80 watts into my bit of wet string I managed to snag them twice - 20m RTTY and 30m CW on two separate evenings. The RTTY contact was plain sailing but the CW contact was a bit hairy.

Conditions were never really great and there was some fading (QSB) on 30m on the night of my QSO. I’d been calling in the pile for a while before operator Bernard (F9IE) came back to me with ‘RIF?” to which I replied ‘G0RIF”, hoping he’d confirm my call, give me my report and I’d just send the usual ‘5nn tu‘ and log him.  As luck would have it though the fading coincided with his confirming my call and although I thought he’d got it right I wasn’t 100% sure of the last character. Had I heard an F‘…or a U‘, an R…or something else?

I erred on the side of caution, just in case he still didn’t have the call entirely correct, and sent ‘de G0RIF 5nn tu‘ only to hear the back end of his ‘tu‘ call as my TX dropped out. Did he have my call correct or not? A slightly nervy wait to see if I was in the log but it was all okay in the end.

The E4X ops seem to have done a good job of working band/mode combinations. I see that some stations have as many as 23 band/mode contacts logged, quite an achievement!

I’m pleased with my 2 contacts though, so much so I didn’t even bother chasing a 20m CW contact when they were loud with me on Saturday, having worked them on 20m previously for my RTTY contact and with CW in the bag by virtue of my 30m contact.