This morning I did my first ever CW activation for Summits on the Air. I did technically make two CW contacts during one of my previous SSB activations a few months back, but this was the first time I completely left the mic at home. I was extremely nervous while heading up the mountain, and completely overwhelmed with anxiety and fear of failure when i first turned the radio on. With a shaky hand I started calling CQ, and as soon as the Qs started rolling in I began to relax just a bit. In my best SSB activations i'd get maybe 8-10 QSOs, this morning, operating only in CW, i got... drum roll......
43 QSOs!!! 4 of which were Summit to Summits!!
I activated W7A/AW-001 Mt Lemmon (9159', 10pts) using my KX2, 10W to my end-fed non-resonant 58' inverted L. With the internal ATU on my KX2 I can tune all bands from 60m up to 10m and I worked every single one of them. Made Qs on all bands as well:
- 60m: 6 Qs
- 40m: 6 Q including 2 S2S
- 30m: 6 Qs
- 20m: 15 Qs including 1 S2S
- 17m: 5 Qs
- 15m: 3 Qs including 1 S2S
- 10m: 2 Qs
I'm going to be putting together a longer vlog on my YouTube channel about the whole thing, but here's a clip of one of my QSOs. I'm still working to become proficient at morse code (only started learning it about 4 months ago) so you'll notice that my head copy has not quite caught up with the speed of my hearing, so I had to ask this poor guy to repeat his completely copyable call sign again, LOL. Thankfully I chase him (via CW) quite often so he wasn't a total stranger.
I've translated the morse code as captions for those who haven't seen the light yet, just enable [CC] and you'll see 'em.