ARRL January VHF Contest
Call: K1TEO
Operator(s): K1TEO
Station: K1TEO
Class: Single Op HP
QTH: FN31/CT
Operating Time (hrs): 26
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
6: 215 48
2: 274 47
222: 106 31
432: 126 36
903: 38 21
1.2: 58 22
2.3: 26 14
3.4: 17 11
5.7: 2 2
10G: 2 1
24G:
-------------------
Total: 864 233 Total Score = 399,129
Club: North East Weak Signal Group
Comments:
Good, fun contest with one major bump along the way and a lot of repairs in the
10 days before the contest. The weather was great for a January weekend which
meant line noise was lower than usual (though my noise general noise issues on
2M remain) and perhaps more rovers than usual were out and about which is great.
The major bump is that after using Writelog as my logging program for over a
decade, Saturday night around 8 pm I received a message on the logging page that
WL had crashed. Recalling the contest file just came to a blank screen. I worked
to see if I could recover the log and decided after a half hour to keep
operating. Then the same thing happened again at 10 pm. At that point I was
seriously discouraged and thought about shutting down. After thinking about it I
realized I would miss the fun and even if I couldn't get the QSO's back it was
worthwhile to continue to participate. I'm glad I did since it was fun to work
so many radio friends as usual. However I don't have a log prior to 10 Pm
Saturday night to submit and I'm not sure how to submit an abbreviated log
without penalizing the nearly 400 contacts I had before the problem occurred.
Rovers were great and as usual helped the score a lot. Tnx for getting on! 222
and 432 contacts are down considerably - I'm not sure why because as best I can
tell things were working normally on those bands and the grid totals are fine. 5
and 10 GHZ on the other hand were not working normally. I heard several grids on
5Ghz that couldn't hear me and not much was heard on 10 Ghz.
There were some nice grids worked on 2M that are not often worked in January
including FN46, 65 and FM14. Unfortunately my noise is so bad that about half of
the time much of the compass is unusable on 2M. I actually worked VA3ELE/r
Sunday evening in EN93 with good sigs on 432 and 1296 but could not hear him
through the noise at all on 2M. Kind of funny to work the grid on 1.2 g but not
2M! I did work 3 stations in FM06 which may be a first in 30 years contesting
at this QTH. KJ4MCZ was one of those and he wanted to try 1296 Sunday afternoon
and much to my amazement he was Q5 on SSB!
I worked 3 grids on MSK144 on 2 meters and I believe 9 on 6 meters. I could hear
many more on 50.260 but it was tough with so many on at the same time. And
requests for tries off of .260 on Ping Jockey did not get much response. It is
really impressive to hear so much DX on the mode and I need to figure out how to
use it better.
As with the Sept contest, 6M activity on SSB and cw was way down. There has been
a debate underway as I write this about the plusses and minuses of FT8. It is
clearly another amazing mode. 50.313 was a beehive of activity every time I
tuned by. Lot's of guys I normally work on SSB and quite a few I've never
worked. When things got slow a couple of times on Sunday afternoon I did get on
and probably worked about 8 stations each time in about 10 minutes. Most were
just going from QSO to QSO off a cq in between so I doubt I could work too much
more in that timeframe. It was fun but I was generally working locals and trying
to run 10 bands I was better off going back to SSB in the hope of finding
stations with other bands to work. It will be fascinating to see how operating
patterns evolve between FT8 and SSB/CW operations.
My score is a conservative attempt since I lost the actual first several hundred
QSO's. The grids are a minimum as thes are the ones I am certain I worked. I am
fairly confident of the QSO totals though especially on the microwaves the
actual might be just a bit higher.
Tnx for all the Q's!
Jeff K1TEO
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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