And this is why I do ham radio:
Worked a pileup on UA0FO, Sergey on Sakhalin. Yeah, those islands just north of Japan … y’know, the whole part of the world my antenna doesn’t even point near.
(picture from Philip Gladstone’s entirely awesome PSKReporter)
Update: I have a much better Ham Radio QSO Map now.
I had modest expectations when I set up my antenna and rig. I might’ve expected to work some of Canada, the northern US states, and maybe far western Europe, and that’s about it. But this map, extracted from my logs, shows different:
New Zealand, Ukraine, Patagonia, Greenland, Brazil, the Azores … way beyond what I expected.
I know the map’s not quite right. The lines should really be curved to be great circle lines on a Mercator map. Also, the NZ contact path was probably roughly SW through Hawaii. This round world doesn’t work on a flat page.