Well, this contest ended for me last night at 0640. Blame
it on El Nino! He cooked up a huge storm in the Gulf of Mexico and
the noise was just too much to contend with. I didn't even hear a
single JA this morning through the QRN and am now listening to W1-3's
running Europeans on 160 as the contest nears the end (2350 UTC now).
Now I know how the guys at 9M0C must feel! Last evening the QRN was
a solid S9 off the back side of my Beverages toward Europe and I could
only copy the strongest stations (my apologies to all those that were
calling and I couldn't hear!)
BTW, I got a nice note from Ted N4XX who claims he has observed
40-50 dB of QRN reduction using the MFJ-1026 Noise Canceller unit. He
is writing a review for CQ which should appear in a few months. You can
bet I will try one of these myself! Ted suggests that all future
DXpeditions in the tropics or subtropics should take one of these units
along. After experiencing only a small fraction of what the 9M0C guys
must have had, I think we should all be a little more humble and empathetic
with the QRN they had to contend with. I think my Beverages work fairly
well but even they couldn't do much with the noise from El Nino.
Anyway, with my last QSO at 0640 last night, I finished with
200 QSO's and 71 countries for 42.6K points. Last year I had 223 and
67 countries and was really hoping I could better it this year, since
I had a good start with 140/64 by Saturday morning! Oh well, better luck
next year and maybe El Nino will stay away!
73, Bill W4ZV
P.S. If you haven't seen N4XX's article on 160 propagation in the March
issue of CQ, be sure to check it out. I've also seen next month's sequel
and it is the best article on Topband propagation I've ever read!
P.P.S. Comparisons to the multi-multis up north:
W3LPL 274/74
K1KI 228/66
K3LR 221/69
--
FAQ on WWW: http://www.contesting.com/topband.html
Submissions: topband@contesting.com
Administrative requests: topband-REQUEST@contesting.com
Problems: owner-topband@contesting.com
|