The Thing That Was So Great About T32C

OK, I’ll give in and do one more T32C post.  A lot of people have been posting their T32C logs in their blogs and on Google+, so I’ll post mine here:

Certainly not one of the more impressive, but it was the best I could do as I contacted them on every band and mode I have capability for. Yup – that’s right, I have a Fort Tuthill 80 (2 watts), a Norcal 2N2/40 (4 watts) and a CC-20 beta version (2 watts). If I’d had a multi-band HF rig, I’d have gone for all HF bands 160 – 10M on CW. I’m pretty happy with what I did manage, especially as the antenna in all cases was a 40M inverted vee with the apex at 47 feet and fed by co-ax,  making it a fairly good antenna on 40, but not on the other bands. I’m particularly happy about the 80M QSO.

As I was looking at this log graphic and thinking about all the people who have been sharing their T32C experiences and successes on their personal blogs, on Twitter and on G+, it occurred to me that one of the best things that T32C did for the amateur radio community was not just that it gave DXpedition QSO’s to amateurs who normally wouldn’t try to work this kind of operation. It wasn’t even that it introduced many amateurs, new and old, to the joy of working DX.  I think the best thing that T32C gave us was a shared experience.

When I was a kid in the 1970’s, every morning at school before classes started, we’d talk about what we’d seen on TV the night before. Of course, this was a long time before the internet and the splintering of entertainment into an almost infinite number of distribution “channels”.  Back then in England, the majority of people watched TV with a rooftop antenna and had access to only 3 TV channels.  One of those offered mainly programming of more interest to grown-ups, so as kids we had the choice of 2 channels to watch. The result was that we nearly all watched the same TV shows, and were all on the same page when we were at school talking about what we’d seen on TV the night before.

This was the value of T32C, which drew attention from many hams who normally don’t try to work DXpeditions or maybe don’t even bother working DX that much, as well as the more experienced DX’ers. We all tried to work T32C, and many of us succeeded. Then we got to share our success stories with each other on Twitter, G+ and in our blogs. The newbies were impressed with the more experienced ops who had achieved contact using many different bands and several different modes. What was great was that the experienced guys were genuinely happy to see the newer ops getting excited about their QSO’s with T32C. We were all happy for each other and enjoying the stories of each other’s efforts and eventual successes.

For a few weeks, it felt to me that we were all on the same page in the ham community. I loved that.

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