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Setup in the car

Early in the week the weather was forecasting a warm (+8C) day for Saturday....rain but warm. Over the past week the temp's have been around -22 C without the windchill so a day of +8 that had to be a day to take advantage of outdoor radio!! Seeing that it was supposed to rain and it sure did I decided to go stationary mobile using my Elecraft KX3 and mobile mono band whips. Before going out I checked the propagation conditions and to my surprise 20m was not really the band of choice it seemed to be 15m. I did bring all my whip antennas but choose to put up the 15m whip to start. I setup in a small parking lot right on Lake Ontario. I was operating 5 watts QRP calling CQ as well going up and down the band for those calling CQ as well. I ran across HB9TNW in Switzerland calling CQ. I gave him a call and he came back to me. He gave me a 429 but that was fine with me for a QRP signal from the mobile. There was lots of fading in

A shot from the car of the lake

and out on both our parts so the QSO did not last all that long but we were able to swap QSO details. I then moved over to 20m and was able to contact N4LTS who came back to my CQ call. Ray was in Florida operating QRP at 3 watts and I was still 5 watts. It was nice to have a QRPxQRP QSO. We had a good QSO for about 10 minutes and conditions started to change so we gave each other 72 and went on our way. That was more or less it for the contacts for the day but I was very pleased with the contacts that I had. I was also impressed while having a QSO with N4LTS there were some op's that came onto the frequency but noticing there was a QSO in progress they stopped transmitting and moved on.