Ceud mìle fàilte, welcome to ham radio!

First, let me tell you that my wife and I spent 2 weeks in Ireland and Northern Ireland last May and had a wonderful time. Lots of good places and good people!

Here are a few suggestions for you:

Monitor the QRP frequencies but tune around a bit too. Leave the receiver turned on and set to a favorite frequency if you are going to be in the room doing something else.

Call a station that has just finished a QSO with another station.

Call CQ if you don’t hear anyone. Someone else may be just listening as well. Use short calls like “cq cq cq cq cq de k5dp k5dp/qrp k”. (Pse use you own call and not mine!) :) The /qrp at the end tells the other station that there is a reason that you sig is not so loud.

Use CW and improve your Morse code skills. It takes about ten times as much power to communicate with SSB as opposed to CW under the same conditions. Learn and use the standard Morse abbreviations.

Keep transmissions short especially when conditions are marginal.

72,
Mark, K5DP