After seeing posts here by VE2ZP and ZL6QH, I realize there are some people
following 3830 who are watching for BERU scores...so here's mine.
This was not such a good year for me. I tried, I tried, I tried....but it
just wasn't there. The Gx's, VK's, and ZL's seemed to be out in force, but
nobody else. I didn't get a single Caribbean bonus point, unlike last year
where they seemed to be all over the place. Never heard anything from
Africa--including 9J2BO--despite spending a lot of time with my beam pointed
that way and doing a lot of searching. But the biggest problem was the
DXers. They were worse than ever. For me, this past weekend was a 24 hour
long fight trying to keep the DXers away. Every time I turned around, some
idiot was putting out a packet spot on me. When that happened, I couldn't
fight the DXers away as fast as they came, so had no choice but to move away
from the spot frequency as quickly as I could. But the worst problem of all
turned out to be the JAs. I did not get one single contact into VK/ZL on
80m, despite putting a lot of effort into it. There may have been callers,
but I could never have heard them for the JAs calling. I didn't see any
spots on DX Summit from JAs for me on 80, but I'm sure they had local
clusters that were spreading the word. They just would not go away, no
matter how I tried to chase them off. I changed frequency frequently, but
they kept following me as I moved. I've come to expect this kind of stuff
from the Europeans, but not from the JAs. I used to enjoy getting up early
in the morning and working JAs on 80, but now it's going to be a long, long
time before I do that again.
Other excuses: It was extremely humid here on Little Cayman and the winds
were fierce. That worked havoc on the power lines, so I had bad noise
problems--particularly on 10m. It seemed the lower in frequency I went, the
less noise problem--a reversal of the norm. That was the good news, because
when 10 was too noisy I could always go to 15 and try to keep the rate up.
But the bad news was that 10 was wide open for everybody. As soon as I saw
that, I knew I didn't stand a chance against VE3EJ!
Anyway, after all the excuses, here's the data. This comes from VK4EMM's
Quick Score, which has been a lifesaver for me. I could never figure out my
score for this contest without this little goodie from John Loftus.
Call: ZF2NT Country: Cayman Island
Category: Single Operator - All Band Mode: CW
Band QSO's Score pts/qso Bonuses
160
80 65 705 10.85 19
40 163 1,615 9.91 40
20 267 2,395 8.97 53
15 239 2,155 9.02 48
10 255 2,155 8.45 44
----------------------------------------------------------------
Totals 989 9,025 9.13 204
Just as a point of interest, I went back through my log to see how many 5
band contacts there were. It turned out there were 42 of them. Things got
so slow at times that I was moving absolutely every caller through every
conceivable band. I figured slow points were better than no points. Most
people were willing to move, although it was obvious that some of the people
weren't able to copy anything but their own call and didn't understand the
request.
--
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