P40W by W2GD. WOW, what a contest. Ten and fifteen were simply
fabulous making possible my personal best CQWW score ever.
Qsos: 7195
Zones: 143
Ctys: 500
Score: 13,533,221 points
Op Time: 44 hours
Breakdown (QSO/Z/C)
160: 140/12/28
80: 423/19/73
40 693/22/79
20 1080/31/111
15 2337/33/115
10 2522/26/94
Seems every trip to P40 Murphy travels with me. This trip was an
exercise in problem solving all week before the contest:
Day 1: Transceiver, Amplifier, Rotor, and 40M beam broken
Day 2: Replace rotor, fix transceiver (freq. display and filter
switching problems, TS930S)
Day 3: Fix Amplifier (Alpha 87A- I think the tropic moisture was the
problem, required multiple resets of microprocessor)
Day 4 : Fix 40 m beam (broken wire on Force 12 Two ele.)
Cannot Sleep prior to contest. Already awake 14 hours prior to start.
Contest Memories:
Lousy start first 10 hours. Just couldn't find the groove on low bands.
Bad S 8 to 9 line noise on 20M entire contest made trips to 20M very
painful. I apologize to all the JA stations I could not hear through
the noise.
Shared 15M with P43A who runs a KW just 300 feet away from my QTH.
Listening on beverages helped a lot.
Great runs Sat. afternoon, 5 hours at 275+ on 15 and 10. WOW! Almost
catch up with P40E who started hot but eventually withdrew early Sunday
morning due to bad health.
Kept the pace up Sunday with 180-195 hours and big 277 hour on 10M to
North America.
Beat my pre-contest goal by 15 % and score was a 35% improvement over
1996 effort. Condx were so much better this year, but very strange at
times. The effects of the flare Fri/Sat were very evident first day
with only about 50 DL's in the log. Great Pac/Oc on high bands. Second
nite 160/80 seemed quite poor but noise levels seemed below normal both
nites. Slept one hour first nite and 3 hrs. second nite (missed sunrise
Sunday morning by 30 minutes).
Great to hear all the new local P43 contesters (P43A, P43E ((licensed
only 3 days - Emily made over 1,700 QSOs)), P43HOT, P43T, and P43W).
Expect much more from these operators in coming years. Very
enthusiastic group.
Hope everyone had a great contest and fun. CU from FS5PL during CQWW
CW. Look for P40R/K4UEE on CW as well.
73, John W2GD
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