Seems some Dutch Army outfit is doing jungle training in Suriname and gave the guys the go ahead to use the equipment for ham purposes.
I got wind of it and decided that I wanted to work them on the PRC 320 so I set it up outside and tuned it for 20 meters. Then I came back inside and started spinning the dial and hunting for them using my base rig.
I heard them just getting started and ran outside, tuned the PRC 320 and lo and behold I heard them so I threw out my call sign.
Because I got in early and things had not been posted on the clusters the pileup was fairly small and I got in early and got on the log on the third or fourth try.
When He called my callsign I jumped in and while I don't believe in a ragchew on rare DX I did tell him I was working a PRC 320 and he was impressed. He said he was running a PRC 150 which is a small 20 watt rig. The PRC runs 30 watts under ideal conditions and mine were less than ideal. I figure I was putting out about 15...maybe.
For perspective I am licensed to run 1500 watts and my base home barefoot rig runs 100 watts.
The Dutch soldier quickly told me they used to use PRC 320s until they got the PRC 150s.
Anyway I dug through the web and found that they were doing some sort of field exercise involving field expedient antennas.
Anyway, the Dutch army has a pretty good QSL policy for this station. It says to just send them my QSL card and they'll take care of the rest. No SASE or money. That's a pretty good deal!
My card is already in the outgoing mail.
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