Calling CQ & Making Contacts

Calling CQ and making contacts

There are two ways to initiate a contact. When starting out it may be easier to respond to another station calling CQ.

Let us work through an example:

You are tuning on 40 metres and you hear “CQ CQ CQ this is VK5XXX calling CQ and listening”.
You respond “VK5XXX this is VK1ABC VK1ABC over”.

If conditions are poor you may need to use Phonetics “ Victor Kilo wun Alpha Bravo Charlie”; repeat twice.

VK5XXX responds “VK1ABC this is VK5XXX thanks for the call, My name is Bob, Bob and your signal is five, nine. Five and nine, over”. Alternatively you want to call CQ. You have already listened and confirmed the frequency is clear.

You call “CQ CQ CQ this is VK1ABC VK1ABC VK1ABC calling CQ and listening”. Depending on propagation conditions you may need to call a number of times before you get a response. If you are operating on a calling frequency (a frequency reserved for calling CQ – normally on VHF and UHF bands) you should move to another frequency once you have established a contact.

“VK9ABC this is VK1ABC thanks for coming back to my CQ, shall we move frequency? 146.550 is clear. I’ll see you there. QSL?” to which the other station would respond: “VK1ABC this is VK9ABC, QSL, see you on 146.550, this is VK9ABC clear”.