When conditions are good ... P2!

I need to share my luck last Friday when I worked P29CW on 30m CW using the FT-817 at 5W and my homebrew balcony antenna at 8th floor (picture1 and picture2 of the antenna).

I headed to the 30m QRP calling frequency, but some rare station was having a pile-up. Another pile up was found on the 10.12x MHz. So I tuned the band for some lone CQ'er and heard this P29CW at 15-16 WPM, 559 to 599 ... I copied the callsign 10 times since I never heard of such a prefix. I replied and he came back with IZ1Z? I sent my call twice and we exchanged reports.

Since I thought he was some European special prefix I didn't mention I was QRP.

Then I opened a paper on my desk that lists countries without a QSL bureau and there it was: Papua New Guinea. What a night!

That was 13800 km with 5W out. The antenna might have an efficiency of 50%, making it a 0dBi radiator according to some simulation software.

So, real QRP DX is possible when conditions are good: it's just that both propagation and crowd need to cooperate. :-)

Now back to my version of the SixBox.