Auroral Memories from W7ZOI

Hi Bill,

I was really on top of it this time and listened to Soldersmoke 115 yesterday evening, the same day I got it from the Internet. I was intrigued by your description of the aurora in 1972. I don't recall that one. By then we were in Oregon. We have had some strong ones down this way, but missed them visually because of cloud cover, a common problem in Oregon. But I have fond memories of the first and most spectacular show I ever did see. This happened when I was trying to go on the air in eastern Washington. I knew that I had put something in my log about it, so last night I pulled my log books of that day and started looking. It took a while, but it was there. QTH at the time was Richland, WA, which is in the SE corner of the state, right on the Columbia River. The station is the first B&W photo on my web site.

I see in my log that on 9/12 of 1957 I had been active. I called a ZL at 1:40 AM on 20M CW. (All times are Pacific time. Probably daylight time.) Then I had worked w2gqn in NJ at 18:11. But the band became quite noisy after that. I have log entries for September 13th, '57, starting just after midnight:

0020. "Tremendous Northern Lights display. Approx 300 degrees of the sky was colored. Sky had green tinge to the north and red in east and west which extended almost to the direct south. Noise level on 14 mc very high. Noise had the character of an electric shaver. Noise masked all signals except W6ULS on 14.048. Noise cleared at 00:44 and heard KG6AAY (Guam). Static crashes remained. 7 mc seemed unaffected by the noise."

00:49. called KG6AAY. No luck.
00:56. called ZL2AHA. Again, no luck.
No more entries until 16:25 when I worked a local friend, Wn7JII on 7 mc.

Yea, I know; the frequencies were in mc back then.

Thanks for stirring up some really fun memories.

73, Wes
w7zoi