So I'm at my backyard station this afternoon, tuning around 20 meters. I hear Russ/K5MQR, who is very loud, and has a lot of background noise on his signal. I soon find out why. He is flying in an air force C130J Hercules military transport plane, 25K' over new York. It is a big plane with 4 turboprop engines. After several tries I broke through the pile up , and we had a nice 5 minute chat. 5-9 , both ways. He said he was using one of the planes radios and the antenna was in the tail section. Wonder if he needed special permission to operate on the ham bands ? Imagine, an Air force guy in a 70 million dollar aircraft , flying at 25K' @ 350 knots , talking to an old guy sitting in his backyard in New Jersey. How frigging cool is that?
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