New England QSO Party
Call: WC1M
Operator(s): WC1M
Station: WC1M
Class: Single Op HP
QTH: GRANH
Operating Time (hrs): 8
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
Band CW-Dig Qs Ph Qs
------------------------
80: 32
40: 189
20: 278
15: 2
10:
------------------------
Total: 501 0 Mults = 66 Total Score = 66,132
Club: Yankee Clipper Contest Club
Comments:
Had a lot of fun in this one, despite punk conditions on Sunday. Didn't plan to
do anything more than dabble for a couple of hours, as usual, but decided at the
last minute to spend as much time as I could during the busy weekend. That
proved to be difficult, what with family time on Saturday and Mother's Day on
Sunday. I was able to work less than half the permitted hours. Still, got in
enough operating to satisfy my itch. This year's 8-hour effort certainly blew
away my previous efforts of 49 minutes in 2003 and 1:49 in 2004! (Sadly, those
were both enough to win Grafton County.)
One thing that makes NEQP fun is being one of the "rare" ones. As one of the few
who use HP, I was evidently loud enough for everyone to hear and, while my
station is modest from a DX-contest point of view, it's pretty good for domestic
events. All that made for plenty of activity. The contest started out with such
a bang, with the 10-minute rate meter hitting 174 in the first hour, I thought I
was in a major contest! Had a 98-hour at the start and a 94-hour during the
2300z slot. Unusual to get rates so high in a domestic QSO party.
Thought briefly about mixing CW and SSB, which seems the best approach for
maximizing the score, but decided just to compete CW-only (no official category,
except in my head.) Figured this will probably be the last opportunity to
practice before WPX CW and wanted to work on my copy as much as possible. My
apologies to those who asked me to go SSB with them.
Second radio didn't help all that much. Didn't take long to sweep the 10-20 KHz
of CQers on the open band. Did some alternating CQs, but that didn't work out
very well.
As all have noted, propagation went down the drain on Sunday. Probably should
have tried to work more DX on Saturday to grab those extra mults. Only worked 15
DX, virtually all EU. There was almost no DX on Sunday. Best DX was, of course,
ZL/NB1B, who I managed to work on 40/20/15.
My only complaint is that there's a rules anomaly when rovers are participating
in multiple county-based contests. I worked about 30 dupes, mostly rovers moving
from one county to another in states outside of New England. It took me a while
to figure out why so many dupes were calling -- I had been ignoring the county
sent by non-New England stations. As popularity of this contest grows, this
could be a real problem for New England stations. As the FAQ indicates, New
England stations get QSO credit for working multiple New England counties in the
same state, so perhaps we need to extend that rule to be valid for multiple
county contacts in any state.
Anyhow, this contest is lots of fun and this year's experience convinced me that
I should try to make more time for it in the future. See you next year!
73, Dick WC1M
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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