North American QSO Party, CW
Call: N8II
Operator(s): N8II
Station: N8II
Class: Single Op LP
QTH: WV
Operating Time (hrs): 10
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
160: 121 41
80: 139 46
40: 116 40
20: 139 42
15: 99 41
10: 57 24
-------------------
Total: 671 234 Total Score = 157,685
Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club
Team: PVRC #2
Comments:
There was aurora Friday night (very clean copyable 6 M SSB sigs) and 15 M was
not open to Eu Sat AM, so I expected condx to be a real bummer for NAQP.
Other
than the dissapointment of no sporadic E and low solar flux, I was wrong.
Things were pretty much normal for this point in the solar cycle. 10M was
surprisingly good, but no Rocky mtn propagation; the West Coast was loud for
quite a long time and actually much louder than on 15M. The backscatter was
weak but workable on 10 and 15M. Overall, I was pleased with the effort on
10, 15, and 160M, but kinda fell short on 80 thru 20M. I probably called CQ
too much during the daylight hours which caused me to miss some mults. I did
move quite a few around, but there's room for improvement. I missed MD on
40M;
activity from MD in PVRC land was very low. There was no QRN on 160/80 and
signals from the Midwest and closer were very good. I think the guys out West
were on higher bands because the few stations I worked like KO7X and CA were
pretty loud on 160.
The activity in NAQP folows the West Coast strategy to a tee. It follows
whichever band favors West Coast to East Coast propagation the best.
Consequently, us guys back East are screwed. At this point in the cycle,
moving to 20 after 21Z and 40 after 22Z is too late to catch many of the
close
in states; come on guys East of the Mississippi, check 20 and 40 EARLIER, so
you get the close in Q's and mults. To compound the 40M misery at sunset,
there was the ARRL RTTY RU and they were all over the band from 7025 up.
I did have rig trouble, the T/R relay was hanging up in my TS-940S and
the CW signal is not clean; time for a new rig. I lost about 10-15 min. I had
to switch to the FT-920 which hears the weak ones well, but has poor Rx
bandwidth which discouraged CQ's on 80 along with TVI in reverse from a large
screen TV upstairs.
VE3,CA,GA,IN,NM,PA,TN,TX,VA, and WV were worked on all six bands. Thanks to
N2NC, N2IC, K7SV, and W4OC for Q's on all six! VP9/W6PH, XE2MX, V31JP, and
ZF2NT were pretty active; I should have done better with ZF and V3.
I like the 100W limit. Most signals were good copy, but very few were huge
causing extra QRM.
Officially I worked 10 hours, but took a couple of short breaks including
a dinner break. I had a little more gas left in the tank at 0415Z, than I
expected to have. Thanks for the Q's; it livened up what would have been a
really dull radio weekend.
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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