Hiroshi Kawazami is one of the rare radio
enthusiasts who takes the opportunity to use their QRZ page to
promote their local sights and wind surfing facilities...
"Let me introduce my home town CHIBA City.
CHIBA City is located about 30KM east of TOKYO. There is a
population of about 960,000. Surrounded by Pacific Ocean. The
picture above is Kemigawa Beach, famous for Wind Surfing, about
3KM south from my home."
Kemigawa Beach. You see World Highest Tower
"TOKYO SKYTREE" beyond the sea. (634M HIGH)
17m, pleasantly surprises
Around 10:00z on a Sunday, I was not looking at
clusters as I know any weekend DX on the cluster will be buried
in Italian, Spanish and other Euro "death star" operators. I
noted some Japanese stations on 17m had been spotted on the DXsumit spotter page,
VOA looked promising, so I went looking further down the noise
and found a faint signal with excellent mod and I managed to make out the call sign. I tried
replying to a CQ and a familiar Italian station jumped in
and was heard. After a brief chat about the weather and the rig,
the Italian kindly offered to place ji1hac on he cluster. And
my heart sank. Within seconds the frenzy arrived and I pretty
much gave up all hope. and went to do some thing else. I
returned an hour later and heard one call ending, so...
I got right in?! I was so surprised I forgot
to start recording at the beginning...
::-::
...earlier conversations with Hiro - the overall session
lasted unusually around 4 hours.
::-::
Yes, it looked faint
against the background of S5 noise we seem to have accept as
inevitable, but it was consistent and perfectly audible, it not
"armchair copy" - very long period QSB:
Biding my time worked, for once...
At around 10:00z on a Sunday, I was not looking at
clusters as I know any weekend DX on the cluster will be buried
in Italian, Spanish and other Euro "death star" operators. I
noted some Japanese stations on 17m had been spotted on the DXsumit spotter page,
VOA looked promising with a rising trend although the general
forecast was marginal, so I went looking further down the noise
and found a faint signal with excellent modulation and I managed to make out the call sign.
I tried
replying to a CQ and a familiar Italian station jumped in
and was heard. After a brief chat about the weather and the rig,
the Italian kindly offered to place ji1hac on he cluster. And
my heart sank. Within seconds the frenzy arrived and I pretty
much gave up all hope. and went to do some thing else. I
returned an hour later and heard one call ending, and I got
heard straight away.
Usually if I wait for the pile up to die down, I
get to hear the DX station wishing "goodnight fans, and thanks for
all the fish QRT!"
Hiroshi also has a quite
wonderful personal web site at
http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~hac/that chrome translates
pretty well. But he manages to keep any image of himself very
well hidden from the internet!
This is
the most interesting Bio I have yet encountered on the internet,
and I have borrowed a pertinent passage concerning his early
experiences here (Google translated):-
"When
girls asked "What is your hobby?" When answering "Surfing and
amateur radio", then I noticed that she saw "amateur radio = eavesdropping"
on girls...
"Oh yeah, do you
eavesdrop on me?" I have never done it. So I then try not to
talk about amateur radio at a party with a young lady.
In conclusion, amateur radio seems to be just
about
'otaku' (Japanese for geek) from a young woman's perspective.
Hobbies that can not be discussed in public can be lonely. However, why do you quickly get on with
another radio amateur? Maybe they are looking at each other as
fellow members of the "otaku" race?
For young women, "amateur radio" is more "dangerous" than a "personal computer"
hobby!
