Finally, some new DX!

It's been quite a while since I've updated my blog, but I did have something worthwhile happen this afternoon, so I thought I'd do a quick post about it. (As an aside, I'm testing a service called "Posterous" which will auto-post this update to several places, including Facebook, my blog, and others. I'll tune the postings as I learn how this works, but you may see this post multiple times until then.)

Sharon and I were out doing a little shopping and running a few errands, then I came home and figured out how to fix the leaking toilet (the washer connecting the fill line seems to have dried out), then sat down at the radio to see what was on. It turns out that the conditions to the South Pacific in generally were pretty good, and I saw a spot for H44MY in the Solomon Islands on 20m CW.  I tuned there, and sure enough, I could hear them surprisingly well. They were working split up 2, so I figured I might as well give them a call, despite the relatively large pileup. After only about 5 minutes of trying, the operator returned my call (or part of it, he initially only came back with K2DB, and while Paul (K2DB) is a nice enough guy I wanted that contact!) so I resent my call a couple of times, he "rogered" and sent the call back along with the pro-forma 599 report, and we were done. My rather loud "Yahoo!" surprised Sharon who was sitting next to me, since to her, CW is just "beepy stuff".

In any case, this is yet another example of being able to work some surprisingly good DX even when the solar conditions are awful. (As I write this, there are no sunspots, the solar flux number is 69, which is pretty much where it's been for the last year or so, the A index is 4, and K is 0.) At the moment, there a lot of stations on from that general part of the world, operating in the All-Asia DX contest, so I'll see if I can get double-lucky and perhaps pick up another new one.

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