Friday afternoon I tried to cut through the band noise and make a few contacts before it was time to make dinner. The results are in the image at the bottom of the post.

(I’m either an idiot or micro.blog’s image embed feature is not working. If you could see the screenshot I tried to share, it would show eight straight contacts with Japan in a 15-minute run.)

My first Indonesian station followed by a flood of Japanese. All in 20-ish minutes. I flipped over to the phone section of the band but could only catch whispers of JA stations, none loud enough to make a call.

The station that interrupted this run? One from the west side of Indianapolis, less than 20 miles away. Radio is weird sometimes.

Appropriate that this opening came from the Pacific. My first big band opening as a young SWL in the 1980s came on a June morning when, suddenly, stations from Papua New Guinea and Indonesia started popping up all over the Tropical Bands. I had read breathless accounts by old DXers about these mornings, and the joys of chasing the elusive regional stations from those countries. I was finally getting my chance!

A box in our basement holds the logs from that morning. I know I sent off a few reception reports to those stations, none of which earned a QSL reply.

Count that as another vote in favor of modern, digital forms of HF communication: as far as the software is concerned, the contact has been verified. No sending letters to islands thousands of miles away and hoping you might get a reply in a year or so.

Now getting current QSOs verified on QRZ, LOTW, etc. is another story…