My first qso into the USA using psk31 on 20m

It has been a while that I posted something on my blog here. Don’t panic, I’ll try to do it more frequent.
I’ve been busy with all kind non-ham related things.

But yesterday I managed to find a free moment and put the transceiver on the 20m psk band. Around 20:40 UTC I noticed a qso that needed more attention.
A Dutch ham had a stateside qso. I barely could copy the Dutch ham, but NF8J was very good to read on my screen. I followed the qso and already noted the details like his name, location, locator, ….

NF8J, Paul lives in Alto, Michigan what is about 6000 km from my location. His surname sounded very Dutch. He wrote that his grandparents emigrated to the USA back in the early days.

After the qso was ended with the Dutch station, I waited a few moments. I hit the Send button and Paul responded. Finally my first qso into the USA. Then a station went into the air, just a few Hz next to Paul. The received text became more garbled, but with the preamp on it was more readable.

We ended the qso and Paul promised to send the qsl card direct because it’s my first. Thanks Paul.

I was so excited that I forgot to tap the Log qso button in Hamradio Deluxe and went to bed. After realizing that I retrieved the saved text of the qso and logged the qso in the log.