Hello all
Having spent the beginning of the week in the UK on a course, which is
tiring in itself, I wasn't feeling very motivated come Friday. I had planned
an early night, and then an early start on Satudray, but didn't get into the
shack until 0645UTC. However, my first contact on 40m was with HC8N (thanks
Ramon - XE1KK!), so that put a spark into me!
I then sat there as much as I was able, working away, spending some time
CQ'ing, followed by periods of S&P for extra mults.
Some of the obvious ones were struggling with the pile-ups, so I
concentrated on building up the Q's as much as possible.
Saturday evening was hard work, with 20m all but dead here from about
1930UTC, and 40/80 were really noisy, making it very hard to complete a QSO.
Somewhere around 2200, I decided it was time to give in, and then we had a
massive storm, which explains all the noise. It just seemed to go on and on,
so I decided bed was a good option.
Conditions on Sunday were quite poor by comparison, although I did pick up
some nice mults towards the end of the day. 7Z, E21, HS etc were quite easy
by teatime.
CQ'ing on 20m during the afternoon prouced a lot of short skip, and I put
GM, GW, GD and EI in the log, plus a whole string of G's.
I also worked HC8N on 15m, and the op asked me to QSY to 10m for them, as
they had just worked EI. I did try, but there was just no sign of them at
all.
However, an accidental press of the 10m band button around 1900UTC (way dark
by then) produced YT6A for the 5th band, plus LU, and then I heard HC8N
calling CQ! First call and I was in the log!
I did try for them on 80m on Sunday morning, but the EU wall was absolutely
huge, and I had to decide whether it was actually worth the time I would
have spent trying to work them against putting quite a few more Q's in the
log, so I didn't bother. Sorry guys!
I ended up with three 5-banders: YT6A, RK2FWA and HG1S.
There were quite a few 4-banders, such as HC8N, EA8AH and ER4DX.
During one CQ session, I got called by 6W1SA, which was very nice, as his
pile-up was huge when I tried calling him earlier. I also got called by
BD0AAI, who sent me HIS exchange first, and it took a while to get some sort
of confirmation out of him. The extra factor was that he gave me Zone 23!
I also worked UA0YAY in Zone 23, which is the first time I have worked that
zone in a contest, and then twice!
There was also some very poor operating practice at times, with lots of
exchanges being interrupted by someone calling, which is not the best way to
get me to work you!
No VK/ZL this time, which was a shock, and I also missed out on Zones 1 and
2!
Putting the Cabrillo file into SH5 produced some interesting stats, such as
there are 564 different calls in the log, that I worked exactly the same
number of W's as DL's, and only half that number with UA3!
My goal this year was to improve on last years score, but I missed that by a
small amount!
Last year, I had a claimed score of 700 Q's, 301 mults for 500864 points.
Here is what I managed this year:
QSOs Points Zones DX: States Multipliers Score
80m: 62 126 5 29 1
40m: 177 377 13 52 8
20m: 423 975 22 72 32
15m: 58 138 13 34 5
10m: 12 26 4 10
Total: 732 1642 57 197 46 300 492600
Rig: IC756Pro - 80 watts most of the time.
Writelog 10.60G + MMTTY.
Antennas:
80/40 - Inverted L, + 2-ele mini-beam for the other bands.
No cluster - which meant I probably lost indication of many 10m openings!
Had it not been for the static crashes on Saturday evening, I might have
stayed up, and I may have achieve my aim to work 1000 Q's in a contest!
My log will be on LoTW shortly!
Thanks to all for the points, and the fun!
73 for now
Phil GU0SUP
--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.405 / Virus Database: 268.12.6/453 - Release Date: 20/09/2006
_______________________________________________
RTTY mailing list
RTTY@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/rtty
|