Had a very stressful moment this morning when I saw on this weblog I was QRV on 12m with the FT817 instead of 10m which I setup early in the morning before leaving home. Luckely my station can be remotely accessed so I did correct the trx frequency with HRD. But then....how many times has the FT817 been transmitting with a high SWR? I cannot see if the FT817 has actual power output through the remote connection. So I had to wait till I got a spot from PA0O which is the nearest station on WSPR here. Luckely around 7:22 he did finally spot me so I have a signal on the air. Now I had to wait till 16 UTC to see if VP8ALJ would spot my 1 Watt WSPR signal to get DXCC 78. At the end of the day I finally had time to view the data collected on
WSPRnet, no VP8. It seems he was not active on 10 today. I was not received by any new DXCC at all. Although on the other side late in the evening WSPR-X I did see a 5W signal from ZL2IT with -20dB on long path, most interesting! Time to test the path with WSJT-X and called CQ on JT9 with almost no results, only spots from LU. Although JT65 was full of signals, even Japan on long path. A fast QSO with CX7BBR (+11000 km, -10dB report) with 5W proved the path is good. But no ZL unfortenately. Then I saw VP8ALJ was active on 15m WSPR, not my best band but tried my luck. First spot I received on 15 was VP8ALJ with a massive -13dB. Unfortenately WSPR-X is not very reliable here and that was the only and last spot the program did. Although there actually were a lot of signals in the waterfall. So I switched over to the old WSPR 2.0 which has proven it's reliable. I don't know why but the old version does a better job. And yes, the next transmission I was finally received by VP8ALJ with -22dB.
WSPR DXCC nr. 78 is in the log!
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