Luke and I went up to the special event station last night. Our primary purpose was to help my friend from Belmont, Randy, KE5RXN, make contact with us. He had been trying all week with no luck.
When we arrived they had a nice pileup going on 20 meters. I called Randy and told him what frequency we were on. He could hear all the stations calling us, but couldn’t hear us. That most likely meant he was in our skip zone. Later, after the 20m band died, we moved to the 40m band. I called Randy again, but he still couldn’t hear us. We never got a chance to try the 80 meter band, but I expect it would have worked, as the size of the skip zone decreases with frequency. While I was there they made contact with a station on Martha’s Vineyard, and a station near Aspen, Colorado, operating with less than five watts, among others.
Today I operated the special event station during the late afternoon. When I arrived things were slow, so I switched over to 80m and Randy and I made contact without a problem. Things remained slow the remainder of my shift. My signal was getting out just fine, as the station I talked to in Manitoba, Canada, could hear me well. Maybe most everyone was still at work?