Originally published in the January 1990 issue of the Collector and Emitter.
The Christmas party at Honor Roll Ranch, just a hoot and a holler south of town, was a grand affair as always. The president. was there, and so were Malcome Forbes and Liz. Of course one of the sensations of the evening, overshadowing others, came when WB5QNK showed up. But the highlight came late in the evening when all those assembled were treated to some red-hot tips on DXing.
The tips came, of course, from the world’s greatest DXer, our own Q. R. Zedd, A5A, worker of all stations on all bands, holder of our only 1×1 callsign, activator of Atlantis on his famed underwater DXpedition to the legendary lost continent a few years ago, and inventor of many good things, including radar and the plastic milk carton.
A good time had been had by all earlier in the festivities, Zedd had worked all Europe on six meters for demonstration purposes, and a zippy tap dancing show had been put on by the darling Tondelayo, Zedd’s nubile blond bride and QSL secretary, who as everyone knows was once voted the cutest graduate in the history of the Harvard Business College. Momma Zedd, over from her antenna farm in Mena, Ark., on her Honda Interceptor, leaped sixteen trucks and the east end of Lexington for us. Young Zepp, the Zedds’ precocious youngster, explained Ohm’s Law and the Theory of Relativity, and Homer Klott recited the Morse code for the letter M. (Homer, faithful readers will recall, is the nerd who challenged Zedd’s assertion that he could Elmer anyone into the ham radio hobby; Zedd has been working on Homer for several years now, and great progress is being made; Homer now understands that you don’t plug the coax into the AC receptacle on the wall.)
Anyway.
It was late. The vice president had headed home. Sam Donaldson of ABC was outside, talking into a hose connected to Mr. Forbes’s hot-air balloon, and it was inflating nicely for takeoff. Liz had finished all the Hostess cupcakes. W5SQJ had stopped talking about the battleship Arizona. I mean it was late.
Zedd, sitting in his swivel chair in front of the No. 1 operating position in the hamshack, was enjoying a Colorado Kool-Aid and reminiscing about the good old days, meaning mostly today. Many of the faithful from the South Canadian Amateur Radio Society were perched in the bleachers along the north wall, hoping something else exciting would happen, like the time a tube blew in Zedd’a walk-in linear, taking out a neighboring farm house and 200 pigs.
What they got was a lot more fascinating than that.
“Boys and girls,” Zedd told them assembled faithful, “it’s the end° of a grand evening. As an extra gift to each of you, I thought I would give you just a few tips that might help you work some more DX.
“So here goes.
“First — and this is the biggest point about working DX you need to be on the air quite a lot. I would say eighteen hours a day is a minimum. If you listen to some of the guys who think they’re big guns (ha ha!), they are on there all the time. Of course if you have a fulltime job that takes eight hours a day, maybe you can only be on the air sixteen hours out of every twenty-four. If that’s the best you can do, then I understand.
“Second, you have got to have a decent antenna farm. You need to have monobanders at a minimum of 200 feet, plus a rhombic or two, a couple of phased vertical systems, and your own satellite system if you can afford one. A longwire also helps. You know about my longwire, the one that runs from Ardmore to Liberal, Kansas.
“Third, boys and girls, you need some power. Not too much. I think 2 KW is about right for talking to a guy across town if the QRM isn’t too heavy. Depending on the distance and band conditions, you crank in more soup accordingly.
“Now as to operating practices, I subscribe to all the rules of on-the-air etiquette, and all, that have ever been suggested. Let me elaborate.
“If you hear a pileup on twenty meters, or anywhere, for that matter, you should not just sit there and listen, hoping to hear the DX station’s callsign, This is a very common mistake. If you wait to see who the pileup is for, he may go QRT. So what you have to do is start screaming your call with everybody else right away.
“You should scream your call about four hundred times the first time around. It is also a very common mistake to give your call only twenty or thirty times, and then listen to see if the DX is going to come back to you. While you’re listening, wham!, somebody else works him. So you just keep yelling and hollering until, man, you can’t breathe any more, and then — and only then — you listen. But not very long, maybe three seconds. If he isn’t coming back to you, suck your oxygen bottle and start screaming again.
“Ordinarily this will work real good. He will work you to get you off the frequency.
If, however, he does not work you, then you should start talking in a real normal tone, saying stuff like, ‘Okay, Fritz, old pal, old bean, thank you for coming back to my call, the name here is George, I spell Golf Echo. Oscar Romeo Golf Echo, George, and the call is Kilo Uniform Five Bravo, that’s Kilo Uniform Five Bravo, and the QM is Norman, Oklahoma, I spell November Oscar Romeo Mike Alpha November, Oklahoma, and you are five and nine, and nine, five and nine, QSL? Over!’
“Well, as you can imagine, this almost always works. The guys out there hear you having what sounds like a nice normal contact, and 99 out of 100 of them will assume the DX actually did come back to your call, and they’ll shut up while you complete the contact. Which lets the DX hear you and QSL.
“There are a lot of other tricks, like instead of yelling your callsign, you get on there and don’t ID at all, and keep asking, ‘What’s your call? What’s your call?’, over and over, like the DX station is a dock who hasn’t identified himself. This technique often draws attention to you,
“Well,” Zedd smiled, opening another can, “there are many other tips I could give you, boys and girls, like operating anonymously out of the band to tell people they’re out of the band, and good stuff like that. But those are advanced techniques you will learn on your own by listening to DX pileups very carefully.
“If you put my principles to work, I can assure you that you will be accepted into that greatest fraternity, the world of the DXer. Because not only will these practices get you your share of DX; they will also identify you as one of the majority on the DX frequencies who do this stuff all the time, proving their intelligence as well as their manhood!”
With that, Zedd bid us good night. We left the ranch with tears in our eyes, humbled and honored beyond your imagination. After all, Santa comes to everyone. But only Q. R. Zedd dispenses gifts from his bottomless bag of clever DX tricks.