I recently found out about the "Reverse Beacon Net" whereby a number of people across the world act as "Spotters", listening out for CW transmissions across the bands and then posting a Signal Report on a website which you can then access to see how far you got. I thought that was a pretty fine idea, so I registered and then did some transmitting.
Oops! Hold on though - I haven't learned Morse Code (apart from my callsign) so what do I do? Well first of all I borrowed a key from a friend and made crude attempts to send "CQ CQ CQ, THIS IS QRP STATION M7MCQ"
Needless to say, that didn't work out too well, so I reduced it to "CQ TEST M7MCQ" and tried that. It still sounded attrocious even to my untrained ears, so I looked in the FT-DX3000 Owners Manual and found that I could type in up to five messages and have the radio do the sending for me!!
Not only does the radio send the message out in CW but it also allows you to decide the send-speed. Excellent!! So I tried it and got some responses on the RBN webpage within seconds.
Initially, I wasn't doing too well getting noticed (10W) so I decided to jump to the frequency of the most recent spot report and then I got responses, so there's a tip for you!
Give it a go - its fun.
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