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The Green Board Rockmite Reaches Sweden from San Francisco

The 20 m Rockmite had a QRPp QSO with  SM5CAK in Sweden  last night! Might I add that the two stations involved were 5,360 miles away from each other, and that the little Rockmite, even with the cool power modification has an output of 3/4 of a Watt? It's all true.

You may have noticed that in my many, many ham radio posts, virtually none of them discuss QSOs (QSO is ham radio abbreviation—a Q code— for a two way contact) made from the house. That's  because I don't, in fact, make a lot of QSOs from the house. There's generally a lot of noise in town, and while the antenna placment is apparently pretty good, things just don't pan out very often.

That's the first reason last night's Swedish QSO was so legitimately strange. About 9:45 PM Pacific Standard Time, (that'd be 04:45 the next morning, GMT, Greenwich Mean Time; yes, again with the ham radio phraseology), I heard SM5CAK calling CQ DX (DX means they were calling for a foreign country with respect to Sweden.) I figured that being in the US, I was as foreign as anyone else, so why not give it a try, not that the station would ever hear me from the house... But they did! A few seconds—seconds!!!— later I heard my callsign, KD0FNR being repeated back to me. From Sweden! It was one of the easiest QSOs I'd ever made from the house, and that made it very, very strange.

The second thing that makes it strange, and  also perhaps explains away the strangeness, depending on how you look at it, is that the Rockmite has had bizarrely strong signals into Canada lately per the reverse beacon network (a system of computer monitored radios that record the callsigns of the stations they hear, and then publish them to the internet.) The little radio that is doing great if it can get 10 dB across the Bay to Berkeley via groundwave has been cranking 30 dB into Canada. I have no idea why. However, you know, the ionosphere does as the ionosphere will do—as no one has perhaps ever said. But, the numbers have been repeatable, and in all likelihood, real. Consequently, it wasn't too big of a surprise that a little voice in my head kept nagging at me to, "check the path to the station..." and "see how it compares to the Canada reverse beacon network stations..." What was a surprise is that the path plowed right through one of the stations, VE6AO!


The yellow line is the path drawn to the Swedish  station from San Francisco. The map markers with 'R' on them are the Canadian reverse beacon network stations. The  same stations where the Rockmite's signal has been getting stronger week over week. Apparently last night, the signal hit Canada as usual, and just kept on crusing... all the way to Sweden! Here's a look at the bigger picture against thet recent Pantoll Parks on the Air (POTA) QSOs from Mt. Tamalpais. Mapping provided by Google Earth, KML files provided by me and Python and qrz.net.


Here's the map of what was going on at the time:


And on Google Earth.



References:

SMM5CAK on qrz.net


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