(The flip side of the 'No US DX Only - ARRL DX' thread)
I had a specific goal in mind for this primarily Contest-Pedition trip, and
that was to (hopefully) end up with the Top 20m Single Band DX Station
Score. I was not there to fiddle around with 'hackers' during the contest,
and did allocate some time to hand out the VP2V multiplier on 40m & 80m when
20m closed up shop. My apologies for not being able to accommodate the
numerous W/VE requests to QSY to 15m & 10m, but I was extremely focused on
what I had gone there for and the 20m Single Band Mission to be accomplished
that I had forked out a lot of $$$ to do. Some will understand this, some
will not. My only other regret is not staying longer for some R&R
sightseeing to make it more of a real 'vacation' trip for my 65th birthday
trip to myself.
There were no free airline mileage plan seats available, so I had to pay
full fare for my tickets to VP2V land. The extortion prices for airport
food and drinks both ways, etc. and related trip costs of putting the cat
in the 'Kitty Motel' while away all added up on top of my other expenses
while on Tortola (I bought a LOT of Contest food there). I figure my VP2VVA
Contest-Pedition trip ended up costing me about a dollar per contest QSO
made. QSL printing expenses will increase this even more.
So it really p*ssed me off when I kept getting called by other DX stations
on 20m, especially when I had allocated time (and pre-published the info) of
being QRV before and after the DX Contest to accommodate non-contest QSOs.
The same thing happened 5 years ago while operating in the ARRL CW DX
Contest from St. Croix (USVI). When 'ONLY W/VE' did not seem to work, I had
to resort to also mostly using 'W/VE ONLY NO EU LIDS' (the most common
offenders were EU), and it's unfortunate things had to get to that point to
finally get some relief. If you work one hacker, the floodgates open up and
that was NOT going to happen on my watch not even once. I had 'given at the
office' as the old saying goes.
I purposefully configured TR4W to NOT work dupes, and with a very short
'Callsign-B4 EE-VP2VVA' anti-dupe message. Unfortunately, during partial
call corrections, some dupes ended up slipping through the blockade into the
log, so I need to talk with Dmitriy about a fix for this. The attempted
dupe factor on Sunday afternoon was horrific. Mostly from QRS/QLF casual
ops, but I simply did not want hundreds of dupes in my log, and it was
generally less time consuming to send B4 EE and move on to the next valid
QSO opportunity. Some will disagree with this philosophy but that's OK. I
might change my mind in the future, and will undoubtedly lose some Q's in
logchecking by the way I did things this time.
Especially on Sunday, I did try to slowwwwww down for most of the very QRS
callers when sending my exchange, and became very adept at pushing the Page
Down key numerous times when getting these types of calls, grateful to get
them in the log. Still, I'm hoping Santa Claus will bring certain folks
either electronic keyers or contest logging software programs to send CW
later this year, because there was a lot of QRS 'straight key' QLF CW during
the contest I found almost unintelligible.
73 & Tnx for all the VP2VVA Contest QSOs (especially so many of the NCCC NS
Thursday Night Gang 'Regulars') .
Rick, K6VVA * The Locust
(VP2VVA & VP2V/K6VVA - QSL ONLY VIA N6AWD)
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