QSL Card From KB0ZIX

Back in my late teens through my mid 20’s my big hobby was amateur radio. I had a Yeasu FT-2400 and hung out on the 2 meter FM band. Most of the time I would just chat with other local hams and developed a couple of friendships. The 2 meter band with repeaters would usually get you a range of 50 miles or so from your location.

This QSL card is from the night of September 14th 1997. A night I will never forget as both a ham radio operator and a scanner and radio enthusiast. It started as I left work at midnight, I turned on the radio as I started the car and I could tell that something was going on over 2 meters..

I got this call from friend of mine on the Hampton Minnesota Repeater (147.360 K0JTA)

N0ZBM to N0RCX, ya out there Scott?
Go ahead Mark!
Scott 2 meters is going insane, lets meet at the field day location and see what we can get for signals above the fog bank
"Sounds great, I’ll meet ya there".

I always carried my radio log in the car incase something ever good happened and that night was the night. Repeaters were transmitting over each other, if you would "key up" you could trip 5 or more repeaters.

This night I had many out of state contacts, I made contacts with people in Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin and Michigan, This is record of a contact I had with KB0ZIX, Darrell in Harper Kansas.

Not was the amateur bands going crazy but so were other parts of the VHF band. I was listening to fire departments in Iowa and Missouri being paged out. Skip was competing with our local radio stations also.

The coolest thing I heard that night was on our local National Weather Service channel KEC65 out of Chanhassen Minnesota. When I tuned in I was receiving KIG76, the National Weather Service out of Paducah Kentucky transmitting on a transmitter out of Evansville Indiana over our signal and it was just as loud and clear as ours, completely overpowering our signal for a couple of minutes. It was unbelievable

Posted by rabidscottsman on 2019-01-11 03:02:00

Tagged: , Scott Henderson Photography , QSL Card , Ham Radio , Yeasu , Yeasu FT-2400 , Amateur Radio , Radio , Signal , Harper Kansas , Farmington Minnesota , KS , Kansas , Harper , FM , Two Meter Band , Two Meters , Communication , Darrell Marek , Band Opening , Temperature Inversion , 1997 , September 1997 , N0RCX , KB0ZIX , 145.43 , Repeater , FM Repeater , 2 Meter Repeater , Skip , Sporadic E , ARRL , Post Card , EM07 , Grid EM07 , Social Media , USA , United States of America , 67058 , Iphone , Apple Iphone 8 , Iphone 8 , Midwest , Flickr