All I needed was one good excuse to quit the contest but it never happened.
A lot of small things happened but not one to put me over the top and pull
the plug.
Before the contest I had 3 noise issues. One that was most disturbing is my
neighbor (400' away from my 20 m tower to the west) has a 50" plasma TV that
gives me S9 noise across 20 Meters. Of course the manufacture LG says there
is no problem with their set. I've exhausted all avenues except for buying
him a new TV. I just can't bring myself to spend the $ for that yet. I
also had power line noise on 160 to the NE and on 10 to the SE, both
directions that I would need for this contest. As it happened I never had
any issues with these sources during the contest.
Several times I thought this is too much like work and I would think
seriously about quitting but a little run or a few new mults kept me in the
game. I've been operating this one seriously for about 35 years+ so it is
hard to give it up.
The past summer was spent installing dissipation radials on my 5 towers,
burying all coax, control lines and conduit (900' of horizontal trenches).
This work took from May to August.
August to October was spent terminating all new coax/control lines and tower
work. I worked almost 7 days a week on these projects.
20 meter tower-had to take all 3 antennas down to repair coax on top
antenna. N9FC helped me numerous days on this.
80 meter tower-had to strip tower of all antennas (4) and remove both 80
meter yagi elements to change design slightly (thanks W4OC) , added
switching to cover center segment of band, and redo switch boxes (thanks
again to N9FC for many days on this project).
All set up inside with 2 TV's for watching football and baseball games on
Saturday and Sunday, I thought it might be a slow contest and needed some
entertainment to keep me going.
At 0400z I had 175 q's and NN3W said he had ~350 although he did say there
were a lot of 0 pointers in there. Being that far behind right off the bat
almost put me over the top as far as throwing in the towel, but I had hopes
for 15 on Saturday.
Because of the poor conditions I did something I never do during a SSB
contest, sleep the first night. Actually took 2 hours breaks both nights.
160 was the most disappointing band because it has been so good the last
month and a half. Only 2 Europeans worked.
80 was another big disappointment although this fall the band has not been
very good. I was never able to run at all, completely S and P. No VK's or
JA's but I did sleep both days around the best times.
40 last year was great (583 Q's) and I was able to run a lot, this time I
was only able to run the 2nd day from 0600 to 0800z (150 q's) for a total
of 377 Q's.
Lot's of new European stations in the log and decent Asia on 20. Didn't
work a JA on 15 but did work Zone 27.
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