Sunday, December 14, 2008

Wish I was there

Last week I worked Jerry, WA2TTI while he was on vacation in St. Croix. He was operating from Windwood, the station better known as WP2Z. WP2Z is a very well-known contesting station, but between contests, I believe that it's available for rental. (The link that I had to the information about renting it seems to be broken; anyone have a valid link?) Since he was operating from there, he was entitled to use the KP2 prefix to indicate that he was there. (Since St. Croix is part of the US Virgin Islands, a US callsign is valid there, and you are not required to use the KP2 identifier, but since there are far fewer stations on the air from KP2 than from the regular US "2" area of New York and New Jersey, it's doubtful that anyone operating from there wouldn't use KP2.)

I've worked stations on St. Croix many times (including working WP2Z 52 times so far; I'm sure I'll work them again) on every HF band that I use (including 160 meters, where I only have a total of 32 contacts out of the around 13,500 total that I have logged) on CW and Phone, and even in a few places using RTTY or PSK. I certainly didn't "need" to work Jerry, but after listening to him chat for a bit I figured I'd say hello.

It turns out that Jerry's wife had a small video camera and took some video during the contact, which he's uploaded to his Picasaweb site. In case you're wondering what the heck he starts talking about, he'd mentioned to someone earlier than he'd been given the speed of a car in "furlongs per fortnight", a valid though not particularly useful unit of measurement. My comment to him (just before the video starts) was that I'd used Google to compute what a speed of 60 mph would be in furlongs per fortnight, and the video picks up from there.

By the way, if you've never used Google to do conversions, it's really easy: Just use a search term like "45 hours to days" or "74 usd to gbp" or "60 mph to furlongs per fortnight" and Google does the rest.

Anyway, it was fun getting to hear myself on the "other end" of the conversation, and the other pictures in Jerry's web album are nice to look at as well.

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