Good , though not a great contest from FN31/CT this year. The wx was a lot
better than last year with beautiful sunny days and low humidity. Last year
when it was over 90 and humid the shack was like a sauna. Fortunately, not
this time. And, last year we had a major T-storm go through and a power
outage that knocked us off the off the air for 4+ hours. With the low
humidity this year came average band conditions. Need a little humidity to
get those coastal enhancements. 2 meter and up condx seemed average in most
directions throughout, though a little below average to the north. And the
dry wx meant that line noise was pretty high.
Very little prep was done in the weeks leading up to the contest. Added a
TS2000 so learned how to play with that. Otherwise, for once, it was nice to
not be running around trying to fix something ahead of time. Then about 2
weeks before the contest we had a period of several days of rainfall. Last
Sunday I was checking everything out and noticed the 1296 ant swr was very
high. Decided to take the tower down and find out what was up. Opened up all
the connections and found them dry. Never found the problem but when I put
it all back together everything seemed fine. Perhaps a poor connection
somewhere. Friday night I came home and cranked up the towers. Quickly
tested things and found that the 2 meter ant wasn't working. Cranked the
tower down but not wanting to tilt it over (big job) I hung on a ladder and
tried to find the problem. the problem was intermittent so was pretty tough
to figure out. Changing power dividers seemed to fix things so I was back in
business Saturday !
mo!
rning. So much for not having to
do much beforehand!
The contest got off to a slow start. Activity wasn't to o great from what I
could tell. And no openings on 6 to liven things up. We did have the Au
Saturday evening though only about a 10 contacts on 2 and 15 or so on 6.
K9MRI was best DX on 2 (K2YAZ in EN74 was also loud but couldn't get his
attention). NI9E and VE1YX were best dx on 6. Funny thing about it was I was
looking for Au based on the prop reports I looked at just before the contest
but hadn't noticed any till VE3TFU called me on 2 mtrs s9+ with my beam NE.
Pretty impressive SSB sig given it was a weak au.
Things were very slow as the night wore on. When I went to 432 at 0100z for
the activity hour, my first 10 cq's went unanswered. Usually I can work
25-35 q's in the first 15 minutes of an acitvity hour. Shows how poor
activity was in the NE this year.
At 0515 z I went over to 6 for a sked and found a W9 on the sked freq s9+.
Wow! For the next hour and half or so 6 was filled with s9+ stations from
the MW and occaisional s1-5 W7's and 6's. Worked 140 or so q's and added
about 60 grids. I usually head to sleep about 0630 z in a contest. I kept
saying to myself I'd head off in 5 more minutes....Finally at 3 am local
time I made the decision to pull the plug. I knew given all of the work on
the tower the night before and that morning I'd be a basket case Sunday
unless I slept. I was hoping Sunday would bring more openings. As it turned
out, 6 was open for another 2+ hours and this turned out to be the only real
opening of the contest from my qth. You pay your money and take your
chances...
Sunday was slow throughout. Much of Sunday afternoon the rate meter was
stuck at 20 or so which is very slow . Lot's and lot's of unanswered cq's.
Only later did I learn that the guys to the south of me in W3/W4 were
working EU on 6. I worked 1 EU in the morning and heard one other (CT1). We
had an opening to VE1/9/VO1 at the time. There was also an opening to FL and
CO for a short while. Other than that there was some very sproradic Es
Sunday evening. The strange part was that for 2 hours or more, stations just
ot the east of me were working Es on 6 and I couldn't hear a thing. W3EP,
K1GX, AA2DR etc are all only 50-75 miles from me and they were giving some
guys s9 reports. So close....I did get into the opening for 5 minutes at one
point, worked 7 stations and that was it.
Some other highlights were working some new grids on 6 (7) and a couple of
new ones on 222 and the microwaves. Thanks to John, W1XX for heading up to
FN64. Heard him munerous times on 2 as loud as s9 . Good job!
Some lowlights included a problem on 2304. Ah, some more work to find out
what's going on there. One of my neighbors called Sunday afternoon to
complain I was getting into his phone. I gave him an RFI proof phone a few
months ago. I asked if her was using it. "It's upstairs and I made my call
from downstairs. I don't want to walk upstairs to make a call" was the
response. Ughh boy.......Last lowlight is activity levels. Don't want to be
negative, but activity in the NE seems to continue to decline. Very
disappointing.
And finally, wonder why this always happens. The contest is about to end in
15 secs and there on my freq is W3IY who I've been looking for most of the
contest. I think we were actually using the same freq without knowing it.
Tuning up to 144.200 to listen to the post contest discussion, there's W4MYA
20 over. I never heard Bob the entire contest and missed his grid on all
bands. This is definitely Murphy's law (or, it's easier to hear the dx on a
qrm-free band, HI!).
Final score was 422k.
6 352 118
2 327 48
222 82 29
432 127 33
903 33 19
1296 49 20
2304 14 7
3456 10 6
10G 10 6
1004 286
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