Very glad to work VU2TUM on 12m CW with 80m Dipole!

It has been a long story trying to work VU2TUM on CW ever since he emailed me some time back that we should fix up a sked and have a CW QSO. We have worked each other several times on the Amateur Radio on International Space Station.

I started following Reverse Beacon Network spots for VU2TUM. I specifically check whether he has been spotted at VU2CPL RBN skimmer, which is about 300 km from here. When I see a spot I will try to monitor that frequency and end up not hearing anything. Today I saw a spot on 24.895 MHz and recorded this short clip.

After that I started trying various combinations of antennas, tuners and homebrew common mode choke to see if I could get through to him with my highly compromised antenna mounting.

Finally we could establish contact with my 80m antenna working on the seventh harmonic on 12m! That too one with apex at just 5m from the ground! I can’t copy even the local 80m net on 3.6 MHz with it. I am happy that we could establish a spontaneous contact without a sked on 12m, though I had used the RBN to know that he was on air! You may think that I am describing how I worked a VU station on CW as if I have been chasing a rare DX station.

But for me, coming back to CW was not that easy after a gap of several decades. High noise level makes copying weak CW signals quite difficult for me and I do not have any CW filters other than the NAR filter in my FT-710 radio.

I had purchased a pair of rather expensive headphones for coming back to CW, but it got damaged spontaneously sitting idle in my shelf!