Thanks, Ralph. And thanks for the AQP QSOs for WX4RUS. The 40M band was
long during the day, but got short in the early evening. Your signal on
both bands was 599 plus! Sorry to miss the meeting, but the experience
with the Russell County Amateur Radio Club at the Russell County EOC was
a good one. We put up a temporary G5RV for the CW station and it worked
well. The SSB station used a permanently installed B&W folded dipole,
which generally acted like a dummy load up in the sky (which is what I
have always heard about these antennas). I think it demonstrated for
the Russell County guys that they need to replace that antenna (or maybe
use it just for 75 where it works half-way at least) and put up
something else for the other bands. Although the plan had been for my
rig to be CW only, since the SSB guys were having trouble making
contacts, after new CW QSOs got scare, I went to 40 phone and made about
120 QSOs in an hour or a little more and then allowed a newly licensed
YL or XYL operator make 5 or 6 QSOs, maybe her first on HF and certainly
her first in a contest. We then lost the frequency to another AL
station, since she hadn't learned not to leave much silence on the air
when running. But, it was nice to see Vanessa get pumped up for HF
QSOs. Band conditons were pretty bad during the day, but improved in
the late afternoon and were quite good at night. We worked DL3DXX on
20, 40, and 80, plus others on 40, including DL3IAC, PA3ARM, UA3AGW, C6,
WP4L, and others, as well as most states. By memory now, we missed on my
station (where we had about 525 QSOs) VT, ME, RI, HI, UT, ND. We worked
only VE3 and VE9 in Canada. I will have to work with the logs quite a
bit to get them ready for submission and to come up with a claimed score
for 3830. One of the computers was one hour fast for most of the
contest (it must have automatically added an hour to GMT at the old time
that Daylight came in) and one of the laptops didn't have the AQP module
for NA on it at all. The one that did (the "CW" station computer has
some errors that need to be corrected.
More later. 73, John, K4BAI.
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