Hours of Operation: 21:08
CW CW band
band QSOs pts mults
160 12 24 6
80 84 210 18
40 367 1187 45
20 506 1562 60
15 235 655 33
10 75 187 7
TOTAL 1279 3825 169 SCORE: 646,425
Comments...
I almost threw in the towel on this one, but know from past
experiences that those who endure poor conditions are rewarded
with a higher ranking in the results - due to the others that drop
out early. It gives us losers with tri-bander stations west of the
Mississippi a chance to make the Top-10.
I checked the WWV numbers just before the contest and the K-
Index was 6 - really bad. I expected that the contest would be
mostly a stateside event, but did not expect the rates to be so good
for the first several hours. It couldn't last, and didn't. I took a 20
minute nap, tried the bands, then took another break. The EU's had
moved to 20, and only Zone 8 can run them in the daytime.
Conditions on 15 came back strong in the later afternoon, and I
picked up some of the HQ station mults with big signals from
Europe. The rest of the EU's weren't there. I should have been able
to run them easily, but they were on 20 handing out Q's to the
needy zone 8's.
I thought conditions on 40 were great, or at least I did better than
usual. I had trouble working the EU mults on 80 (but JA was easy),
and activity was very light on 160. In this contest, I can usually run
EU's for hours at night on 20, but this year I hardly made a dent
in them. I missed most of the russian zones, and missed JA on 15.
With the persistant coronal hole on the sun, the K-Index is rarely
under 2. This is going to impair contest conditions for at least a few
more months - and then there is the sunspot bottom.
Station...
Force-12 C4XL @ 104 ft (rotates)
KLM KT34XA @ 50 ft (fixed NE)
5 el 10M Mono @ 70 ft (fixed NE)
80M 4 wire sloper
160M wire vertical
K9AY receiving array
FT-890 & FT900 (compact SO2R)
Alpha 76PA & Ameritron AL-1500
NA Software
Roy -- AD5Q
Houston Tx
http://qth.com/ad5q
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