This time around from N4WW I made my first real foray into the world of
packet, entering the SO/assisted catagory. Of course, as you can guess
from my country total below, our idea of packet spotting here in Florida
is a bit different from that in the northeast or Atlanta, etc. There
was only one other station active in the contest on the packet system
(K0LUZ, who was doing a 10 meter single band, with some general spotting
for me thrown in). There were a handfull of other guys who put out some
spots, and then there was a whole bunch of juicy spots for the CW bands
and WARC bands :). I didn't expect much, I have to admit that I really
only entered the assisted catagory to duck K4XS, having proven before
that I can't compete with his antenna system. N4WW is a big station,
but from 40-10 the _smallest_ advantage K4XS enjoys is having double the
number of elements in his arrays!
160-10:
0/0 31/28 64/39 659/75 1016/107 929/105 = 2699/354 = 2.87M
Conditions on the high bands were fantastic, especially 15. I ran JAs
the first night until 0700 (2AM local time). The 2nd night 15 never
closed at all. As sunrise moved across Asia and then Europe, pretty
much the whole world was workable, with very strong signals.
Unfortunately, there weren't very many stations on, so finally at about
0800 I went to 20. Some of the stuff that called me between 0500 and
0800 included JD1, VS6, XT, V73, UL, UJ, UM, UF, UD (running 10 watts!),
5Z4, 9K2 and a bunch of other europeans (most of whom were awfully
suprised to find me blasting in at 30 over S9). If only this had been a
CQWW weekend, I'd have really cleaned up :).
I'd be interested in hearing about how 15 was from the west coast -
those guys must have been working JA until darn near JA sunset.
73, Ron WA6DGX
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