I’ve got four days off from work, this week, so this morning, I decided to make it my day to “sleep in”. Thankfully my wife let me sleep until 11:00am. I seem to need to do that, once in a while, just to “catch up” on sleep, I guess. She did wake me up, abruptly, though, and I am also thankful for that.
The reason why she woke me up is because she heard some traffic on the scanner that I left running in the ham shack/office. Any other night, I would have turned off the scanner (or anything else that makes noise in the shack), but I must have forgotten, last night… thank goodness.
When she woke me up, she said that it sounded like there was somebody in an airplane that she heard. Being half asleep, still, I wasn’t sure if I left the audio for the air traffic feed turned up. I hardly ever turn the audio on that one up, even though it’s running all the time. I soon realized that it was the amateur radio scanner that she had heard.
I had heard of individuals being aeronautical mobile, before, but it was the first time I had ever heard one, myself. I jumped on the mic as soon as W9AFB called QRZ on 146.520 MHz, and he heard me, right away. Perfect signal, though I turned down the squelch, just in case. We had a short QSO, and he got back to contacting others.
Since I also have an ADS-B antenna and “Orange” receiver, I also pulled up the map of the aircraft that I was picking up. I first thought that he was one of the other planes that I saw, but after confirming with him that it wasn’t, I looked closer at the MLAT data that I was receiving. It turns out that he was in a military aircraft designated as “TOPCT14”. I got back to him, a little bit later, and he confirmed that he was in that plane. They circled the region a few more times (training, I think), and then left the area, toward the south.
My XYL told me that she heard Lyle talking to him, before I came downstairs. I tried to get in touch with Jason and Michelle, but because it’s a Monday, both of them were working and weren’t able to get to their radios.
It was a really cool experience, and I enjoyed making the contact with Scott. I let him know that I would be sending him a QSL card, when I noticed that they were leaving, as they flew south past I-94. I filled out the card, right away, and realized, as I was completing the QSO information that my radio was set to only 5 watts of output power. I thought about cranking it up to 50 watts and trying to reach him again, as they flew past Brookings, SD, but I really didn’t want to be “that guy” that gets annoying.
Anyway… I hope to talk to him, again, if he comes this way in the future.
Here’s the audio (major timeshift – all “dead air” gaps removed) The full length was 1 hour & 19 minutes: