On 28 September 2010 14:36, Scott Tilley <[email protected]> wrote:

 Finally!  After months of trying, our gear, conditions and most of all our XYL's patience all worked together to produce a QSO!

JA7NI (DFCW30) and VE7TIL (DFCW60) completed a trans-pacific QSO on 2200m this morning a first between Canada and Japan.  CN89dk to QM09fl is 7162km.

Things started off with a surprise as NI copied TIL's beacon signal 30min before his sunrise.  What followed was a 'quick' exchange of calls and NI's report was received by TIL.  Then a very long and deep fade occurred.  This happened before to us and we lost each other and an entire nights sleep...!  But that taught us a lesson and we adapted to the deep fading on this path by creating a master slave relationship between the stations and using QSK to full effect.  Master slave means the station that is expecting a reply simply waits until he hears it while the other station transmits until heard with pauses (QSK) to listen...   NI waited patiently not knowing TIL had copied the calls and his report.  Our procedure was for him to simply wait until he copied something...  Three hours later RO appeared on NI's screen and during one of my crawls out of the bunk I saw a dot during a pause in transmission and stopped the transmitter.  A few minutes later there was an R and TU but not in DFCW but rather QRSS as a malfunction at NI's end had him scrambling, but he recovered with grace and the QSO was in the bag...

This QSO caps off months of work by both operators in improving their stations and beaconing on the path to learn its characteristics to make a QSO possible.  What is clear to me is the trans-pacific path on 2200m is a very viable communication path for amateur experimentation.  I'm sure time will demonstrate this further as procedures and equipment improve on both sides of the ocean.

I would like to particularly thank Yas, JA8SCD (the Tokyo Grabber) for his help and translation services.  Without him this would have been much more difficult.

More details including station equipment to follow in the next few days as I get caught up on my sleep and family life :-)

73 Scott
VE7TIL CN89dk
http://www3.telus.net/sthed/argo/