NASA On The Air (NOTA) is stepping up our activity for 2025. We were successfully able to activate KSC, JSC, and SSC during the weekend, commemorating the 55th anniversary of Apollo 13. As a special treat, Sean Cannon KK4RYN from the KSC N1KSC club stopped by on Sunday for a quick shack tour and a few hours working our NOTA event.
The overall NOTA event kicked off on Saturday. Jayant KG5LJZ, Jerry N5FWB, and I installed our triplexer onto the TH7DX beam, so we could concurrently operate 3 radios on 10/15/20m. Unfortunately, our triplexer setup is constrained to only 100W, so we had to bypass our “big signal” amps and allow our 7 element beam do our heavy lifting.
Nonetheless 20m and 15m seemed to work well. I manned the 10m band, and oddly didn’t hear a single US stateside signal over the afternoon hour. The signals heard were VP2 in the Virgin Islands, and a handful of other DX South American stations, relatively strong. Signals were definitely skipping over the US, so domestic comm was not on the menu for 10m on this day.
Sean had been attending the FIRST Robotics championship event earlier this weekend, but found time in his busy schedule to visit us around 0900AM on Easter Sunday. And after a nice chat about common interests between clubs, we hunkered down to work off some NOTA QSOs on 20m SSB. Sean smartly suggested using 14.313 to symbolize our commemoration of the Apollo 13 special event. That was a stroke of genius!
It was immediately obvious, Sean had lots of contest-type expertise as he deftly built a pileup and peeled off contact after contact at a high rate. Several contacts shared their personal experiences or family associations with the Apollo program. Most were simply happy to have been acknowledged through the huge pileup and having notched a QSO with us at the famous NASA JSC site. The combination of our power, antenna and good propagation, kept our pileup intact over the whole 3 hours operation. I estimate that 80 percent of our contacts told us we were 10-20dB over S9. That’s so fun having such a strong command of the band and allowing lesser station setups (QRP, low hanging antennas, mobile and portable) have an opportunity to work us. I served as co-pilot performing logging duties on the N3FJP logger program.
Here are 2 photos of Sean smiling away because of the massive pileup yet not being able to decode a callsign because of the feeding frenzy of signals stepping ontop of each other in simo.
All good and fun things had to come to an end, as Sean had to leave at noon to catch his plane back to Florida. It was such fun and real pleasure having one of our sister station members come for a visit. Many thanks to Sean for stopping by, and to Michael WA4ECT at N1KSC for encouraging him to contact us.
Of course, we had to take one of those unflattering selfie shots that one always regrets afterwards
73
Dave W5OC