ARRL DX Contest, CW
Call: N8II
Operator(s): N8II
Station: N8II
Class: SOAB LP
QTH: WV
Operating Time (hrs): 25.5
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
160: 21 17
80: 151 51
40: 185 63
20: 1148 102
15: 90 43
10: 23 13
-------------------
Total: 1618 289 Total Score = 1,402,806
Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club
Comments:
Well, I must be doing something right, at least running on 20. 20 was in great
shape, at least into EU for a few hours. Best 60 minute rate was 172 at 1303Z
Saturday. After 17Z Sunday running on 20 basically ended. The fun on all bands
was basically over, tough to find a new QSO or mult.
10 was by far at its best in the 17Z hour, some actual loud signals from HP, P4,
PJ2, YV, and not so loud PZ and J3. FM5BH was good copy but no QSO, a lot of
CQ'ing in the face of callers from Laurent on several bands, must have a high
noise level. 10 closed tighter than a drum by 2 hours after its peak. I had high
line noise on 15M most of the time, did hurt score, but there was no direct path
open to EU detected from here. I did get a few big guns on scatter around 17Z
Sunday. 20 is the new 15M, open to the same areas at same time as 15 was only
2-3 years ago. I used to come down to 20 around 18Z with peak EU conditions in
the 19-20Z hours. I also discovered how bad my noise floor is on 80, had a few
callers I just could not copy and could not copy a lot of what the big guns were
running. 20 was open late to north EU and open well to JA, but no runs.
As usual, 80 was enormously better in the days leading up to the contest. I
worked RY9C around 03Z and easily worked SSB stations all over EU at 23Z about 3
days before the test, many well over S9. Saturday night was the pits after 01Z
on 40 and 80 was poor all evening. Hats off to the guys running hundreds of EU
on the low bands, no such luck here. No decent runs on 40 here either, was there
around sunset and after Saturday.
Mention must be made of the incredible turnout from the Netherlands, by far the
greatest participation per capita of any EU country! They just kept calling and
calling on 20, 66 Q's vs. 177 for Germany, 109 for Italy, 50 for England. My
pile ups on 20 were never out of control, but did get big enough to slow things
down
several times.
There was some very poor operating, especially Sunday. Please, DO NOT KEEP
CALLING A STATION WHEN HE IS TRYING TO WORK SOMEONE ELSE OR CALLING A PARTIAL
CALL. The pile up behavior was pretty bad from USA stations. I did break several
huge pile ups with a trick. Those who don't know the trick, just please keep
using the brute force approach, fine with me. Other awful things were sending
"QSL" and "K", and repeating exchange and call over and over
again. Another new very annoying habit is just lazily waiting if the exchange is
not copied rather than being smart and sending "?" to let the sending
station know again.
I don't think a try at the phone end is in the offing, will hand out QSO's when
I am enjoying it. Thanks for all of the calls, even had a tedious run on 80 for
about 25 minutes Saturday, struggling to copy many. Luckily the noise level was
low on 20! Luckily the EU activity level is still high despite conditions.
73, Jeff
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