Some Contacts You Never Forget

[park]

I have been a weather watcher all my life and while looking at the record highs and lows for past few days reminded me of a contact that I will never forget. If you look at the record highs for Austin, TX in 1996 for today and the past few days you will notice some highs that will probably never be broken, upper 90's and even a 101!.
After having such a hot daytime high in the month of February causes one heck of an inversion at night (hotter air a few thousand feet up then on the surface). As you may know that will enable a VHF / UHF signal to travel much farther than normal.
The VHF / UHF bands where open like I have never seen before or since. I made many contacts in the southern states those few days but one I will never forget,,,,,,I don't have his call sign (that would be funny if he saw this post!) but I was using a Kenwood HT, 5 watts and the rubber duck antenna and the other station was fixed in St. Augustine, FL. !!! That was on 446.000 mhz

 

[WX2MIG]

:drool:...now that's one hell of a contact.....:drool:

That should qualify as "DX" for the 70cm band......

Heck...we had a simplex Sky-Warn net tonight on 2m, and I couldn't even reach the middle of our county with 65 watts through a Ringo Ranger....

Our Fire Dept operates on 154.445 Mhz, and during the summer we'll get tropospheric ducting up and down the coast, we would hear other dept's from New York City down to Baltimore all night long coming over the station speakers.....about 15 years ago they got the money budgeted to replace the old repeater, we got a new Motorola with PL tones, and a lot of the other dept's changed frequencies, so we don't get the noise we used too.....