Well done Mike, I enjoyed your video. I always get a kick out of working you and other activators with low power. Occasionally I'll run 1 watt and it's pretty cool when someone comes back to your call.
Thanks for checking it out! There is something regarding about making a contact at lower power or with some other challenge involved.
still think the credit should rightly go the folks that have an antenna capable of RECEIVING these qrp calls...just saying!
I know when I operate portable, whether it's QRP or some other compromised setup, that it's likely the station on the other end (DX or not) is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Conditions are important too though. Still, the OCFD and linked dipole that I have used in my two 1-Watt POTAs both work pretty well, regardless of power.
I agree, my antenna setup here; with my high background noise floor makes it very difficult to be able to receive. Grateful to be able to get on the air here at all.
Once I did 300mW CW into a randomwire. Made 11 contacts in 15 minutes. Would be fair enough for POTA, but for OK WWFF, I needed 44 QSOs... I had set up the radio that way before for some testing and then forgot to change it... Sure thing... But that's why I like S2S or QRP-to-QRP QSOs the most. Once, I heard a guy on Antarctica, very weak CW, such as 229, no chance that he'd hear me back... But I tried and it worked... I had a 100W into a wire. He e-mailed me a photo of his station -- the same radio, 100W and a wire. Amazing contact... And so far, another great contact happened to me... A VK SOTA activator, also just a wire and 100W radio. Not sure what he had, but on SOTA, probably nothing fancy... And, as said, contacts like this I enjoy the most.
Great video! I checked into a 20 meter QRP net last week with 5W & several of the station reduced power to less than 1W after the NCS checked them into the net. I also checked into the 3905CCN 40 meter net last week with 5W and worked several stations. It can be a lot of fun to see where to can talk too with only 5W.
That's awesome! The QRP SSB Net on Sundays is great. I can't always do it, but try to when I can. It's fun to test out different antennas and see how low you can go. It's also helpful in learning about propagation.
I can agree if someone is running just a couple of watts into a shortened loaded antenna of some sort not far off the ground, then yes the other op gets much of the credit. But I've found 5 watts into good antenna at the proper height can often be hard to differentiate from a 100 watt station. I never sign QRP, and many ops I worked were never even aware I was running low power.
If conditions are good enough you can work even with milliwatts. I worked JG1SMD on 6m SSB who was using a Home brew radio and 500 milliwatts with an HB9CV antenna from his balcony in Northern Japan, he was so happy to work VK and I was surprised when he told me his set up and power.
