Wish I had the time and talent to write the interesting stories about
contest weekends like K3ZO and others do! In any case, here are some
notes about our M/M effort:
Running a multi-multi effort with four full timers and two part timers
really insures that everyone can operate as much as they want to! Three
of the regular ops were at J39A and just may enjoy their taste of
contesting from the Caribbean so much we'll never see them again...
We did manage Worked All Continents on all bands 160-10 and I can't ever
remember working zone 40 on so many bands (six!) thanks to TF3IRA.
160m was also fairly painful. Both K1KI and KC1XX had 12 QSOs and 10
mults, while K3LR managed 17/12... I forget when it was but I know I
heard K0HA working Europeans I couldn't even hear.
80m was as bad here as anywhere. Note that we only had 21 QSOs in the
first hour on 80m, K3LR had 19 and KC1XX had 23. It was painful.
Actually, 30 minutes before the contest we were outside with flashlights
and an Autek meter checking out the coax and radials because no one could
hear us. It turned out the Alpha 77 we were using showed much more
reflected power than was really happening (bad metering circuit), and that
conditions made it easy to hear Europe but not for them to hear us. I
wouldn't be surprised if stations in the midwest or central US had
comparible rates!
Why is J45T (SV5TH?) always easy to copy and can't hear us (80m)? It
seemed like he couldn't even work the Europeans calling him much of the
time. We did manage to work him last year but not this year. I think he
needs a Beverage antenna!
40m started off slowly but others in the east found the magic formula
before we did (move above 7035 to find less crowded territory) and Sunday
morning's opening to Japan was one of the best ever.
20m was bottomless. The combination of one high antenna (5L@132') and a
lower stack (4/4L@92/52') on Europe was magic. No waiting in pileups and
some great runs. Unlike the other bands where several different ops
traded time, 20m was mostly ironman W1RM, with a couple of subsitutes for
a few hours here and there.
15m was much better than on SSB when the top (105') antenna failed.
Turned out to be a broken connection at the balun/driven element. This
time we were much more competitive, and the 185 hour on Saturday morning
is one result. We didn't track who was on each band and when - so several
ops are claiming that hour! The last two hours were very good to Asia
also.
10m was as others noted, nice LP each morning and a brief burst of great
signals from Eu on Sunday.
On several bands we could see the results of the low geomagnetic activity
as northern European stations had better signals than usual, especially
late in the day and often were working into the central and western USA
after they had faded here.
This time we logged all USA contacts, and all dupes. No more "QSO B4"
response, and it seemed to make things go smoothly. Not as many zero
point USA contacts (but 3 zones per band) as I had expected, and also not
as many duplicates:
Band RawQ Dupes NetQSOs %dupes USA
160 143 2 141 1.4 28
80 506 6 500 1.2 31
40 1637 62 1575 3.8 47
20 2290 95 2195 4.1 54
15 1606 51 1555 3.2 35
10 436 7 429 1.6 19
total 6618 223 6395 3.4 214
Thanks for the QSOs and see you in the ARRL DX Contest next year.
73 Tom
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E-mail: frenaye@pcnet.com
Tom Frenaye, K1KI, P O Box 386, West Suffield CT 06093 Phone: 860-668-5444
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