[amsat-bb] (no subject)

[n3tl@bellsouth.net]

Hey everyone,

Patrick, WD9EWK, and I had a pretty cool CW contact on AO-7 this evening. 

As far as I know (I'm confident Patrick will correct me if this is inaccurate), both of us were on full battery power and using handheld Elk antennas. My station included one FT-817ND for transmit (at 5 watts out) and another for receive, and each was running on its internal battery pack. I pulled the plug on my Acer netbook and let it do the Doppler tuning on its internal battery pack. I connected both radios to the Elk with a Diamond duplexer, and used the straight key I picked up for Straight Key Night this year.

Patrick was a solid 579 when he called me, and he worked AJ9K after our contact. And unlike me, I believe he is still manually tuning for Doppler. I confess that I've gotten spoiled very quickly by the computer's assistance in that regard.

I believe these are Patrick's first contacts on Grand Old AO-7. Congratulations to him. Here's to many more contacts with our "flea power" portable stations.

73 to all,

Tim - N3TL