Not too shabby when you consider that the bands were in really poor shape
with a K=7 and A=95 on Saturday... Glad to see that the high bands were
in good shape on Sunday, though the low bands were atypically noisy (for our
QTH in Jamaica) on both nights
This year "Team Vertical" decided to really see how well verticals on the
beach play, so we decided to go QRP and do single band entries. All rigs
were Elecraft K2's running 5 watts, and the antennas were all vertical
arrays supplied by Force 12.
Summary: we eclipsed all six North American QRP records, and also eclipsed
4 World QRP records. All this from a 2-point QTH! We had hoped to eclipse
the 80m world record too, but Op N6BT came down with a flu and was in bed
for much of the contest weekend.
All entries are Single Band Entries running QRP
160: 162Q, 6Z, 17C = 7,567 pts (K2KW ~ 4 hour effort)
80: 588Q, 14Z, 55C = 86,763 pts (N6BT op)
40: 1337Q, 22Z, 72C = 298,168 pts (old world record was 117K) (W0YK op)
20: 1209Q, 23Z, 64C = 238,728 pts (old world record was 230K) (N6XG op)
15: 2166Q, 28Z, 93Z = 637,670 pts (old world record was 364K) (KE7X op)
10: 2578Q, 31Z, 99C = 843,700 pts (old world record was 431K) (K2KW op)
This all boils down to 8,040 contest QSOs, 124 Zones, and 400 Countries. If
this was a M/M, we would have had around 9.7M points!
Quite amazing to have stations like 5A, VQ9, JY, etc call us when we were
running 5W!. Also pretty amazing to beat out people in pileups. Who wudda
thunk all this was possible with QRP!!
A special thanks to the gang at Elecraft who offered technical support
before the trip, and for K6KM, K6III and N6XI who each loaned their personal
K2.
de Kenny, K2KW
k2kw@prodigy.net
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