Later that day I was back in the shack and I noticed that one of the email addresses had bounced. I thought to check the entry on QRZ.COM to see if it tallied. Another email was sent to this address just as a precaution.

The days passed and nothing came back from BZY. "Had he got my messages?" I wondered. Well nothing was going to be left to chance so I dispatched a final email in the hope that it would hit the target. Not wanting to be defeatist about the situation I went back to VUSHF and took another look at the entry. Maybe there would be something I had overlooked or ignored and consigned to the irrelevant bin? There was. Enrico has also specified a channel on WWConvers. That explains why I had overlooked it - WWConvers was completely meaningless to me!

"Aha! Another possibility" I thought, "I must investigate further." Away to Google I went, after all, it couldn't be that difficult could it? Surely there must be a simple web or applet based chat client. Well, that was just the beginning. Already September 1st had arrived and I had several clusters running on my two-monitor shack PC, watching for any signs of Enrico surfacing on the radio. A quick search had previously bookmarked a couple of possibilities for WWC both of which were Telnet based; this was surely the way to go.

Well, I don't know if my I.Q. has taken a rather large dip lately, if dementia was snapping at my heels or I was plain stupid (put it down to my medication...) I

I could see my own echoes but somehow they were not entering WWConvers. I must confess at this point that although a user of the internet, spanning right back to the days when I had to dial up into the USA to get access! Despite this considerable wealth of experience, I remained steadfastly a 'user' rather than an 'IT Consultant' which my peer group seemed to be doing in their droves. The technical aspects of the internet simply did not interest me and my brain is structured such that if it does not interest me then it does not stay.

At one point another friend of mine appeared on Skype and I happened to know that this guy was also interested in contacting IS0. I watched him log into WWConvers and start having a conversation in Italian, so I said hello. Guess what - yeah, he didn't see me either. By now I really had enough, so I got on to Skype and asked if he could relay my messages, which he kindly did. It turned out that Enrico had got my emails but had not managed to reply prior to leaving for IS0 where his internet connection was rudimentary. Via my Italian "repeater" friend, Enrico gestured that I would get my opportunity soon.

I spent the rest of the day tinkering with various web based clients and Telnet scripts. I found out quite by accident that KST chat actually had a WWC function of it's own! All this time on KST and I didn't know that! Like I said before, if it doesn't interest me.... Finally I found a web-based java client that agreed with me and I was up and away. Now I watched for Enrico to appear and hold a conversation with him directly!

I watched helplessly for the next two mornings as Joe, still presenting as DI2AL at this point, had a sked with BZY and failed. They failed not because of any deficiency on either part but simply due to a combination of terrain, antennas, QRP and conditions. One can effect good MS contacts even living in quite hilly terrain, but one thing that can often be overlooked is that the vertical radiation pattern of an antenna changes with height and with VHF antennas one normally ends up with a series of lobes, with the highest gain lobe at the bottom. If your hills are close by then much of the energy from this bottom lobe can end up in the hillside rather than in the atmosphere.

Well, my turn came. As usual, knowing that I was the first G to get a shot at the accolade, the experience brought with it its usual share of apprehension and excitement. Well, I won't bore you with the details of the QSO - there wasn't one!

"Eh?" I hear you say! That's right, we didn't complete. Never mind completing, I don't think we even barely got started; conditions were terrible. My hope for a Hat-trick of Firsts was in ruins, I don't remember for certain at the time of writing but I think there was another "G" lined up for the following day so my chances were gone. Resigned to a day of normality I went about my usual tinkering and radio-play.

I had a long lunch that day; there wasn't much of any consequence happening on the radio so there was no urgency to get back into the shack. When I did return, there was a soldering job commanding my attention so my gaze never made it to the PC monitor which was churning over a screen-saver thus not offering any eye candy. My elbow knocked the mouse - up came KST chat and a host of other windows and clusters left over from my IS0-watch. What was this? Enrico was in the 70MHz cluster:-

04 Sep 2007 1238 IK0BZY    70210.0 IS0/IK0BZY  JM48 MS/JT6m,any1??           

Well, 1238z meant 1328 local (BST) and although my lunch was a long one, it wasn't THAT long, just as well really. The ironic part is that I was in the shack when Enrico issued the message but the PC was in screen-saver as I said above. Naturally as soon as I saw the message I issued a response on cluster thus:-

04 Sep 2007 1250  G7CNF-@   70210.0 IK0BZY      I will try agn

The soldering job came to an incomplete and abrupt end - that could wait! Now my attention was back on 4m and it wasn't going anywhere else for a while. WWC went back on and it wasn't long before I was exchanging pleasantries with Enrico. As it turned out, by now Enrico was tied up with some Tropo contacts closer to home and we weren't able to kick-off straight away. A review of my log shows that the QSO actually began at 1444z which is a terrible time to be contemplating an MS QSO but hey - I wasn't complaining!

The screen-grabs accompanying this text say just as much as I could describe in words, so I'll keep the commentary brief. The QSO was completed at 1627z so you can tell it was not one of those 3-minute affairs like my QSO with DI2AL. I am no stranger to long MS QSO's - my record was on 6m with ES2RJ, Tom (regretfully now SK) - that QSO lasted a whopping 3½ hours! This 1H 43m paled by comparison but for certain it is my longest 4m QSO. During the latter stages of the contact at 1600z my wife summoned me to dinner, that was cold when I got to it. I suppose I should be grateful I didn't end up wearing it. . .

73

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