Last night before heading up to bed, I glanced at the DX cluster info and noticed a South Africa station was spotted from a couple US stations so I flipped the radio on and tuned to 40m. The operator was ZS4U (Barney) and he was booming in. He was in the Extra portion of the band and it was my first time manually setting a split on my TS-2000 and putting my call sign out as an Extra class operator.

Setting split worked like a charm and was easy on the TS-2000. I’ll have to check but I guess I just need to switch back and forth to hear both sides of the QSO, making the xmit frequency the receive frequency when the other op is speaking. The TS-2000 makes that easy with the push of a single button.

When ZS4U was done with the QSO he was in when I tuned to the frequency, I put out my call sign but he picked up another op. When he did, the other op said hello and that Barney was booming in and he’ll stand by in case there were weaker stations that might want to try. So I put out my call sign again and Barney came right back to me. Gave me a report of 57 (he was 59) and he seemed to have no issue copying me.

Based on the distance between my grid and his, we’re about 8,017 miles apart. It’s easily my longest phone contact which previously was 6,350 miles into Kazakhstan on 20m. My previous longest on 40m was Honduras at 5,500 miles. I’ve had another contact with South Africa but it was on 20m RTTY, both with the same operator (ZS2EZ) during 2 RTTY contests.

So thank you Barney and thanks to the operator that stepped aside to let some others get a shot at ZS4U. A great way to the end day!

73,
K2DSL