Eyeball QSO

I had an interesting eyeball QSO yesterday.

It was interesting not because of the topic, but where I was at the time. I was half way up a tree in a complete strangers front yard while they were out at a Christmas party. The QSO was with their next door neighbour.

No it wasn't anything naughty. As wildlife carers my wife Donna and I had got a call to go and pick up a baby bird. It had fallen out of the nest at the caller's house. They'd made a makeshift nest for it and put it back up in the tree, a big jacaranda, but the parents hadn't come back to feed it so it needed to go into care before it starved.

There were a lot of ants on the tree, so while Donna was getting some gloves for me and I was planning my climb I noticed a wire in the neighbour's yard going from the fence to a mast. On top of the mast was a rotator and a couple of antennas. Hmmm, thought I, the neighbour must be a felow ham. I could see him over the fence on the other side of his yard and I knew that as soon as I went up the tree, he was going to see me.

Sure enough, he wandered over to say hello, I told him what I was up to and to prove it removed the yellow ice-cream container from the other side of the tree where it was obscured from his view. I then asked if thy were Ham radio antennas I could see. From there it was an exchange of callsigns and what equipment we had. He explained that he wasn't very active as his main interest was astronomy, I explained that I wasn't very active as I'm usually too busy with the animals.

I could have sat there, up in the tree, and talked all day except for the ants and the fact we had five more birds of various species in the car and it was about 32 degrees celcius (90F) at the time.

I just wish I'd written down his name and callsign before I forgot it.

73 de VK4VSP