Worked Algeria 7X and Greenland OX today!

Well it might not have been a prolific day in terms of the number of contacts, but I did work a couple of interesting prefixes on the bands today. There is a dearth of SSB activity since midnight on Friday when the CQWW CW contest began. As you can imagine, there is huge activity on the CW portion of each band. SSB has suffered though. There was very little to be worked on the bands for non-CW stations like me.

At about 3.50pm this afternoon I saw 7X5ST spotted on the cluster on 20m. Not expecting to hear much, I quickly spun the VFO down to 14.210 and heard him about 4 and 5. He said 7X5ST QRZ so I jumped in and he came back to me first time. I gather he wasn't working a pile-up, probably because the band was closing to an extent. He gave me 4 and 4. I didn't care too much about my weak report, but was delighted to work a new country. It was a quick QSO.

This evening I heard Oscar Xray 3 Kilo Quebec (OX3KQ) calling CQ 40 on 7.155 LSB. I tried a few times and he got me the third time. Thanks for the nice QSO Jesper. My first contact into Greenland. By the way, that's Jesper's QRZ.com picture above.

Two good contacts on my half-size G5RV!!

I look forward to exchanging QSL cards.

A little aside to this post: After I worked OX I was punching the air and cheering, as one does when one works a country for the first time. My four-year-old daughter asked me "daddy, why are you cheering?" I said, "Because I worked Oscar Xray and Seven Xray," was my reply. "What's Seven Xray?" she asked, inquisitively. I said, "It's Algeria pet". She put her head to one side and, with a look of disdain on her face, said:

"Daddy, you're so boring . . ."