No. 27 January 21, 1998
L.I.V.E. DX
(Low Impact, Vegetarian, Environmentally Safe DX)
If you draw a line from the southernmost tip of India to Malagasy Island off the West coast of Africa, you’ll trip on the Maldive islands about a third of the way down. It’s a long way from Southern California, nearly ten-thousand miles. I’m sitting here listening to 8Q7AA on eighty meters. It’s our local sunrise and I worked him about ten minutes ago when his signal was barely discernible. It was a difficult, rough contact. Now I can hear him as clearly as the gal next door and I feel a little stupid. It’s like when I caught myself salivating at a cat food commercial.
The sun is fully up, now, and he’s starting to fade. I’d say the "window" opened for about thirty minutes. During that time we descended upon this hapless bunch, knee-deep in an Indian Ocean beach, flinging wads of RF energy.
Looking at an assortment of DX-pedition videos this week, I can imagine the bedlam the Maldivians had to tolerate. We tend to forget that each station has a unique perspective and you might hear them call for "The ‘X’" when I don’t. This mixed awareness gives rise to all kinds of aggressions - angry scolding and recriminations - sometimes causing worse interference. It’s a form of "radio road rage," and we need to take a breath and sit back.
Right now, I’m thinking about making a getaway before the "feds" come knocking. Seems FT5X on very rare Tromelin Island was announced on the DX Packet Cluster on 18.108 and I called him a couple of times on SSB before I realized that the US ‘phone band starts at 18.110! Forty years and still making dumb mistakes. That cat food is lookin’ mighty tasty.
It struck me, shortly after my dumb mistake, as I was listening on the 17 meter SSB band, that ham radio serves a greater and more important purpose. It is the one public forum where you can be real wrong. I mean real wrong. Of course, there are wrong-sters on television, radio, etc., but they have to be a little right. On the bands, you can be completely wrong and most likely, someone will agree with you. I guess it’s a bit like sitting around the old cracker barrel in the General Store. Remember the beer commercial where the gummers were talking about "…running the long horns out’a Saragosa… Or was they short horns?"
These days, we’uns can’t sit around the ATM at the Seven-Eleven and tell tales - no sir! We’ll get arrested by that bald guy over there with the gun.
Around mid-band, someone from five-land was searching for the new issue of Astronomy magazine with the 3-D pictures. "3-D pictures of food?" "Yessir."
A quarter turn up the dial, this:
"I pulled him out using my Timewave DSP and my 940."
"I didn’t know the 940 had a DSP."
"I got it from AES."
"Yeah, AES bought Timewave."
Working the Nagano Japan Olympic station on twenty meters last night, I waited my turn as N4VA, the operator of 8N0WOG/0 worked a fellow up north. This fellow began to tell a series of tasteless jokes while 8N0WOG/0 worked the pile-up right over him.
Have you ever asked yourself what happened to that kid in your homeroom with the weird look in his eyes and a high gloss of Wildroot on his forehead? You’ll find him on the high end of twenty meters.
You can be truly wrong on CW, because most non-US operators know just enough English to communicate. You can say about anything to them and they’ll respond "RR 73 CUAGN TU." After spending the day being mostly wrong about everything, quietly desperate, and seething with inner turmoil, why not grab that mike or key and let go? Tell ‘em the Rams are back and the Dodgers are leaving. Tell ‘em canola oil grows hair and you met Elvis in a UFO. Don’t you feel better already?
There’s a homespun charm in the wrong-way earnestness on the ham bands. Like "road rage" in pile-ups, we have to resist the temptation to break in and propagate our own version of the truth. I wanted to tell them fellers on 17 meters that it was "AEA" not "AES" and that Timewave bought AEA, not the other way around. But why bother? I’m headed over to Seven-Eleven for some cat food.
…Harvey, W8DX