/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>2681062
Pick the highest band you can hear others on and the lowest noise. I haven't heard many SSB QRP, but know several QRP enthusiasts. They favour CW.

That said, you never know what you'll hear. I've had 2 memorable QRP contacts. Summer '93 I was standing at the entrance of a cave in a mountainous area couple hundred km from civilization (see attached pic, not me btw). On hikes I would put out my call at top of the hour on 146.52 MHz with my Icom W2A ht. I almost fell over when a guy driving by on the highway about 5 km away answered. Our QSO was very short as he was going out of range quickly but next day I had an eyeball QSO with him when he was visiting my town. We both marvelled that the timing & location had to be just right. Still got the QSL card.

The other one was on 80 M. Buddy built a 5 W SSB radio the size of cigarette pack that we took backpacking. We had dipole up about 10 metres in the trees by the beach, less than ideal but best we could do. Condx were poor & we had an evening sked with a couple of locals back home about 80 km away. Bang! Clearest signal breaks in, some W7 who is kayaking up the coast & camped out in a remote cove about 150 km away. For a week he could hear people but no one could hear him. He too was QRP. He dialed down the band and heard us chatting away around 3735 kHz & gave us a call. So here we were sitting around a campfire talking to another guy who was also sitting around a campfire. All the while the 2 or 3 stations at home couldn't make him out at all but could hear us talking to him. We did some message handling for him. We relayed his location & msg to my friend back home where he went on a net in Washington State the next day & passed along the info that was destined to his parents. After that, word spread among the radio community in my region & numerous stations kept an evening watch for him as he made his way north.