DXCC #209: TJ3SN Cameroon

Back in my SWL days, my favorite time of the year was fall. At that time of the year, as the days got shorter and sunsets came earlier the 60m tropical broadcast band would be hopping with West African stations from Gabon, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Senegal, Cameroon, and many others.

Sunset in New Jersey roughly coincided with midnight over there, and most of these broadcasters would sign off around their local midnight. I'm sure there were some low-band grey line propagation enhancements, too, although I didn't fully understand much about that at the time.

These days, whenever I work a station from Zone 35 my mind hearkens back to those times when I would rush home from school, fire up the DX-160, throw the headphones on, and slowly tune down from WWV at 5 MHz and tick off the stations I would hear regularly while keeping a careful ear out  for ones that weren't there yesterday (or the day before, or ever).  Soon after sunset, the beautiful African music would disappear and be replaced by equally beautiful Latin music from South and Central America.

I've logged and confirmed several of these West African countries on the amateur bands while some of them still elude me. One of the latter was Cameroon, until yesterday. TJ3SN was fairly strong on 10m at 2130 UTC and I was able to get him in the log at 2141. This morning I was greeted with a pleasant surprise: LOTW confirmation! Many thanks, Nicolas!

DXCC Mixed #209 / CW #197 / 10m #71