ARRL January VHF Contest
Call: K1TEO
Operator(s): K1TEO
Station: K1TEO
Class: Single Op HP
QTH: CT
Operating Time (hrs): 26
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
6: 212 39
2: 298 44
222: 122 28
432: 180 36
903: 28 14
1.2: 50 15
2.3: 22 10
3.4: 10 6
5.7: 4 4
10G: 1 1
24G:
-------------------
Total: 927 197 Total Score = 339,234
Club: North East Weak Signal Group
Comments:
Overall, while there was no enhancement, it was a good contest for me:
-For January in CT it was warm. High 40's or so both days. While that didn't
seem to help condx, it did mean we didn't get the high line noise often seen in
this contest when the wx is cold. It did get a bit windier Sunday night ahead of
the Nor'easter that hit Monday and that did increase the noise levels.
-Activity seemed ok. Nothing like a decade ago when I routinely was over 1000
QSO's in this contest, but about the same or perhaps better than recent years.
At least for now based on my results over the last few years, activity is no
longer dropping off.
- My QSO's on 6 and 2 were down modestly from last year. However my 222 QSO's
are near my best total in any contest, while my 432 total may be my highest
ever (Almost 30 years from this QTH). I am not totally sure why but there were
a number of rovers out that had the bottom 4 bands and maybe that is why? Also
asking if stations had other bands almost from the start was perhaps a help.
-903 Mhz continues to be down. I'm pretty sure my station is working but it
just seems like fewer are on this band. Going back a few years in my logs shows
that 903 totals were almost the same as 1296. There were quite a few stations
that worked me on A-D and 1.2 with no 902. Also, in the past there were more
rovers with microwave bands. This time the rover activity was good but again,
most were 4 band stations. My 2.3 Mhz station worked really well but with fewer
available rovers the total was not as good as some recent years. And while the
3.4 total is not that great, at least my RX is back which has been a problem
for a few years. Hard to tell what is going on with 5.7 and 10g. Hopefully it
is just there are not a lot of local contacts to be made and not a station
problem.
-I worked more stations on Sunday than Saturday. It is usually close but not
typical to work more the second day. Part of the reason I think was that I
worked very few Packrats Saturday. Overall it looks like I made about 215 QSO's
with club stations (23%!). I would guess that a third of my Sunday QSO's were
with the Packrats. 14 of the 16 hours I was on Sunday had more than 25 QSO's
and 7 had over 35. Between 8 pm local time and 10 Pm I hit a brick wall as the
rate dropped dramatically. Maybe he football game? I figured that was it but
the last hour had 31 QSO's which was nice to see (and woke me back up, hi!)
-The (relatively) new rules are definitely having an impact. Right from the
beginning there were stations - myself included - connecting on the chat pages.
I also noticed that had I not caught some stations on the chat page I wouldn't
even have noticed they were on the air. I'm wondering if less CQ ing is
happening because of the ability to connect off air?
-And along those lines MSK sure seems to have changed things a lot. 6M SSB was
much quieter throughout the weekend. I "heard" quite a few tropo
stations on msk that I never heard on ssb. My results on MSK were very poor. I
guess I need to work on a better strategy. I called CQ a number of times
announcing my freq on Ping Jockey but got only a couple of answers. And at
least here when I checked 280 there were often local stations on both sequences
making it impossbile to hear scatter stations calling CQ there. And as someone
noted earlier (W3IP?), it is hard to juggle all the information on the screen.
With the chat pages going, PJ and my old fashioned station that relies on
manual switching to change bands, it was hard to keep tabs on who was calling
CQ where on MSK. Running 10 bands makes it difficult to stay in one place and
wait for a station to become available. Anyway, to K1JT and the other
developers it sure works well and is fun so hopefully I will improve my
strategy and results in the future.
- Tnx to all the rovers who were out and about. I caught WB2SIH, K2EZ, N2DXT
K1DS, W3ICC, NN3Q, K2TER, N2SLN, KB1EYG, KF2MR, W1RGA, K8GP and K0BAK that I
can remember. That's a pretty impressive group for a January contest in the NE
- tnx guys!
73, Jeff K1TEO
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