Twice a day

I have met Tof DJ6ZM twice a day on 40m yesterday. The first one was a QSO through short path at 21Z. The band was not necessarily very good. But his signal controlled at home through the intenet came through on the very quiet band. His signal was 589 with a bit of flutter. Almost nothing was heard from the western Europe.

Before sunset, around 07Z on the same day here, Tof gave me a call with mosquitto signal when bemed to NA, that was, off side to him. Again, he was at home. He is an excellent listener to have found my signal with 339 at first. With my beam being pointed to him, his signal built up to 569. Still clear cut rise and fall of ths signal typical for that through long path. It sounds mysterious to 40m lover like me. I seldom meet a guy in the western europe twice a day on the same band.

His remote controlled signal has had some problem of choppy keying. He said it was due to the delay in the internet. The dots sounded irregular at this time. Later, this morning, when I met Alan AC2K who used to work him twice since this July, Alan told me his keying had sounded good. Is it dependent on the speed of the internet varying from time to time?

Needless to say, I have met Tof in Seattle this summer. It was not difficult for me to imagine that he operated with a PC at home. He has had much fun when he operated ths same kind of system at the Hilton Inn in Bellevue in July. He seemed even to be proud of operating radio with such cutting edge technology.

It was not such a good condition as we could leisurely ragchew. Maybe, in some time around the winter solstice, we might have a big opening on either way. I would ask him if he has retired from his business completely and has his daughter taken it over.

It is still tough for us to find friends in the UK. For Tof's signal from a KW iwht 3 ele reachs here in this way. Not a pipe line. I hope to catch some of them in the plateau of the condition, as I used to do with G3FXB or G4BUE and so forth on 40m long path.