Getting back on the air after a long hiatus has been an interesting experience. A lot of things have changed since I was first licensed, and a lot has changed since I was last active. I knew that some advances had been made on the repeater scene while I was away but on Sunday afternoon I learned about one of them in a big way.
Now repeaters have been linked for several years. I had heard that some Bay Area repeaters were linked to Los Angeles, and I figured that some Tucson repeaters might be linked to Phoenix repeaters. Online research told me of one that is linked to several other repeaters to effect coverage in southern Arizona and southern New Mexico, as well as up to Greenlee County (AZ). A long conversation with a ham radio friend from my San Jose days (he's now up in Prescott Valley) told me of EchoLink, where he talked to a guy in Ohio. Well, EchoLink can get you much farther than that.
I had my handheld on in the garage, turning it on to listen to it thinking that it would be nice background noise while I would start organizing some things. It couldn't have been on more than ten minutes when a British-accented voice identified with his callsign.
I'm thinking, OK, we have a visitor in the area from the UK, and he forgot to add his stateside identifier onto his callsign. I answered, but I wasn't going to point that out, as that I wanted to find out what he was doing here in Arizona. Well, it turns out he wasn't in Arizona. He was in Nottinghamshire, and using EchoLink to talk to someone over here!
It turned out to be a great conversation that lasted twenty minutes. He was explaining how he had activated EchoLink from his cellphone, and how HF work in his neighborhood is challenging due to manmade electrical noise at his location. He loves working on HF he told me, but he takes a mobile rig with him and drives to the coast. We discussed HF operation. He had questions about 2 meter usage in the United States, as well as the 70 centimeter band. I had some questions about UK callsigns as that I didn't know when they started issuing callsigns beginning with "M" (for years it was "G" only). He's been over here a few times; I told him I had been over there but only for an overnighter near Heathrow back in 1995.
It was nearing midnight at his end. so we said our 73s. A ham up in Phoenix had been listening in and also gave him a shout, since he hadn't had an international contact before on 2 meters, and me, I'm really jazzed too. I mean, I have talked to several European countries and some South American countries on HF (as well as Japan, Australia and New Zealand) but most of that was done using Morse Code telegraphy in the CW (continous wave) mode.
In the meantime, I am not yet back on HF. I'm putting in a great deal of thought as to which antenna I should put up first. I can get a 20 meter dipole up easily enough, but I'll need some help with the 40 meter antenna which I'm sure I can get from one of the locals here. Another holdup to a return to HF is a desire on my part to get my Morse Code proficiency back up, so I've been doing some online practice. It would be great to get back up to 20 words per minute, but 10 will do, and I expect I'll be able to do that once I get more of the 7 1/2 WPM practice sessions done.
I know, I could always go phone (voice), and I'm sure I'll do that as well, but with declining solar activity I don't see that as being as reliable a propagation mode on the 20 meter band.
But getting back to talking to someone in England...........that was really cool!
Now to repeat that on the 20 meter band.
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