Montenegro

[k4kyv]

DX condx were OUTSTANDING on 160 and 75 last night (Sunday night).  There were DX pileups on 160m CW, and there was a more or less relaxed slopbucket roundtable on 1850 that included more than one dx station.  Some occasional crashes of QRN, but not enough to make things difficult to copy.

I QSY'ed to 75 and talked to some of the usual stations on 3885, then we started having breakers from the west coast.  Worked AM stations in Washington state, Los Angeles and AZ.

Then I QSY'ed to listen down below 3800 and heard a very strong (S9+10dB) signal from a guy calling himself Darco, 4O3AA, in Montenegro, calling "CQ DX North America."  He was not getting any takers, even though it was still early evening (about 0430 GMT), so I moved the relatively pissweak 8005 rig down to his frequency and gave him a call.  He immediately answered, and gave me a 5-9 report saying that I was solid copy.  He discribed his station as running a kilowatt to a dipole.  I replied, and described my station setup, and pointed out the fact that I was running AM.

We talked for a couple of minutes before he QRT'ed to work more stations.  I heard the next US station he worked ask something about me, and Darco mentioned to him that I was running AM.

Darco could have changed over to AM and our QSO would still have been solid 100% both ways.