Journal ·
I BROKE A NAIL AND I DON'T EVEN CARE
Two crooked trees, one very messy wire, and my very first two contacts ever.
Okay. OKAY. I need to write this down before my hands stop shaking because I am one hundred percent still shaking.
So today I finally just… went for it. Grabbed the antenna wire, walked out to VDNKh, found two trees that looked roughly antenna-shaped-distance apart (I did not measure this, I want to be very honest about that, there was no measuring tape involved, I just went “yeah that looks about EFHW-ish” and threw the wire up there), and it ended up hanging kind of low and kind of crooked and honestly it looked less like a proper antenna and more like I’d lost a fight with a tree. Which, also true, see: my hand.
Because getting the wire up there was NOT graceful. I scraped my hand on the bark trying to get height on one side, and somewhere in there I also broke a nail, like properly broke it, and normally I would be very upset about this because I liked that nail. But I genuinely could not care less right now and that should tell you everything about how the next part went.
I plugged in, dialed the power ALL the way down to one single watt because I wanted to see what would actually happen with basically nothing, sat down in front of this crooked ugly beautiful wire, and started calling.
And someone answered me.
And then a SECOND someone answered me.
Two contacts! On my messy tree-wire! On one watt! Both here in Russia, both just… hearing me, on 40 metres, both giving me solid 59 reports back like my signal wasn’t coming off the least professional antenna installation in the history of amateur radio. I said thank you probably too many times on the air, I don’t even remember exactly what I said because I was so busy internally screaming.
I keep looking at the log entry. Two lines. That’s it, that’s all it is on paper. But I am sitting here with a scratched hand and a missing nail and I have never felt this kind of happy from two lines of text before.
This is it. This is the thing everyone was talking about. The wire works. I made it work. A crooked antenna between two trees I didn’t even measure, on one watt, and somebody heard me.
I don’t think I’m sleeping tonight.
73 and 88, Iskra