On Friday 23rd April I received a QSL card from Andy Doffing, LX1DA. My contact with Andy was on the 15 metre band using data (FT8). I was really pleased to have this contact with Andy: I thought this would add another country/entity towards my DXCC score! Andy enclosed a note with the card indicating that he is active with a special call, LX40DA. He has this call until the end of the year and it is to celebrate being an amateur radio operator for 40 years. I will certainly try for a contact with this call.

However, I have been mining my QSL archives and I found that I already had worked this country on the 13th April 1991, that is 30 years ago!

My QSL card from LX1CW is shown below front and reverse sides. I was surprised to see that our contact was on the ten metre band (28.486 Mhz) and I received a quality 5 signal report at strength three. My antenna, in suburban Adelaide, was a quarter wave length long wire cut for 160 metres. My report to Gilbert was 5 and 7. Our contact lasted about five minutes and his location was about 30 kilometres north of the Luxembourg City.The matching to my transceiver, a Uniden 2020, was achieved thought a home-brewed parallel tuned coupler using a circuit from the ARRL Handbook.

In 2001, Jenny, my wife and I attended a conference in Maastricht in the Netherlands. It does not seem like 20 years ago. After the conference we were able to visit a number of European countries, including Luxembourg. We will never get back to Europe again sadly. There are other countries as well but also including Luxembourg that I would like to visit again. But that will remain a dream. However, in our wonderful activity of amateur radio we can take virtual tours to many countries!