More radio activity today. The weekend space weather report doesn’t look promising so I took what I could get and had another good radio day. Friday included a few random POTA contacts, a little DX, including an all time new one, and then I wrapped things up with the K1USN SST.

With just 148 DXCC worked there remains plenty of low-hanging fruit for me on this quest. Needing almost everything, I haven’t bothered making a “list” of what I need. I work DX and upload it to LoTW and let it tell me how I’m doing. So when I worked J88IH (Saint Vincent) on 20 meters this morning I didn’t realize it was an ATNO. I would have sworn I had worked the island before, and maybe I did, but never received confirmation for it? That changed today when Ira quickly confirmed our contact and my DX total incremented by one.

Happy dance for me!

There was also a nice cache of DX worked that wasn’t new, but it still gets my blood pumping. I never turn down a chance to work VK’s, ZL’s, and anything down along the Austral path and there was plenty of that for the taking this morning.

I worked LU8XW on 10 meters this morning and the location might make it the most interesting contact of the week. It’s the club station for Radio Club Ushuaia in the Tierra del Fuego Province of Argentina, an incredibly long country that stretches 2,360 miles from the subtropical north to the subantarctic south. Ushuaia is way, way down at the very bottom tip of the country, you can’t get much further south! My logging program said the contact was more than 6600 miles distant and if you take a look at a map, you would have to agree!

Finally, there was the one-hour K1USN SST or slow speed sprint. I’ve played in this one before though it’s been quite awhile. As usual I did a 20M only (CW) entry at 50 watts with the portable antenna. Also as usual I struggled a little with N1MM as I don’t use it that often. I managed just 16 contacts, but it’s good CW practice (20wpm or less) and more importantly, it’s another chance to bone up on using the N1MM logging application in an actual operating event.