This was certainly the best contest we've ever done in terms of number of
Qs. I think our previous best was 252 and we ended this one with 296.
Total score was over 28500. That likely will not beat the CA crew, but for
a January with no propagation, I'll take it!
The trip started with a journey to the heart of Packrat territory. These
guys are awesome! I've never seen such a concentration of serious
contesters. I had 94 Q's with operators in FN20 and most seemed to know
that I was going to be there. The big multi-multi N3NGE sent out notice of
my rover plans and they were ready to find me.
We started at the very North edge of FM29, just to the West of
Philadelphia. We stayed until another rover showed up and we gave them the
lowdown on what was happening. We made 90+ QSOs in that first 2.5 hours.
>From there, we spent a few minutes to the North in FN20, but didn't have a
very good spot and needed to get South. From there, we went to the Delaware
coast in FM28. We were busy for 2 hours until we realized we had to leave
to be home before too terribly late. Again, the Packrats found us.
The drive back home in central PA was interesting. While mobile, with
directional antennas, we made a pretty good number of contacts, including
some in excess of 200 miles. I'm not sure how that worked, but it seems the
beam patterns of the yagis gets a bit haywire when they are nested on top of
each other.
Sunday brought church and family obligations. We were in FM08 by 2:30.
Skyline drive was closed due to weather so we set up at Chester Gap. This
doesn't allow for much aiming of the beam and we were stuck pointing farther
North than I would have liked. This is also where my 222 DEMI transverter
died in the middle of a QSO. It was still a good spot, but not as good as
Hogback would have been.
After some family duties, I left my logger at home and headed down to FM17
and 07 in Louisa VA. This didn't result in a huge number of contacts, but I
did pick up several mults. My 144/432 duplexer also failed here but I
worked around by putting a switch in line. I lost a few Q's with that.
One other note here is that the station was really upgraded this year. W8ZN
helped by making a keying box that allowed all bands to be run from the
IC7000. That made a huge difference. There were also far fewer switches
and less to go wrong. The trasverter failure drove me nuts, but that's not
anything to do with Terry's help.
In all, it was a great time. I'll be spending more time in Packrat
territory in the future. Those guys are awesome!
6 meters: 78
2 meters: 106
222: 46
432: 66
grid/band mults: 62
grids opened: 8
total mults: 70
Claimed score 28560
Steve
K4GUN/R
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