Hi all,
Well, wasn't it nice to see the bands open! No 10m activity here at all, but
15m was buzzing well, and this is the first time in a few years that I have
worked JA's on 15m.
At the start of the contest, I decided not to set any goals, as I am still
new to running Win7 and the Microham Microkeyer II, so I thought I would
make it up as I went along. I started on Saturday mostly S&P, just in case
Win7 decided to crash on me again. I did not want that to happen during a
nice run, so S&P seemed a cautious move.
By mid-evening on Saturday, and having no troubles with Win7, I thought that
600 Q's would be nice, so I went to bed that evening thinking that I could
manage 600 if I did a good bit of CQ'ing on Sunday.
Got up a bit later than planned on Sunday, but found 80m was nicely open to
V3 and P4 etc, so worked as many as I could manage to find, and then I hit
40m. That was quite poor by comparison, and was only open to EU.
I worked as many mults as I could manage for the extra points, and then went
straight to 15m for an hour, and it was great to see so many JA's on the
band.
By 1640 on Sunday, I had hit my "goal" of 600 Q's, so decided to up that to
700.
I had some nice runs on both 20 and 15m, and a great run of W6/W7's after
being spotted. Some of you 6/7's were like EU stations here, with huge S9+20
signals. Amazing.
It was also very pleasing to be called by VU2RMS, as I had tried calling
him, but the pile-up was rather too large to consider.
At around 1730UTC, I went to 40m, worked some in S&P, then decided to go for
it and call CQ here. I only have a small antenna for 40m, so I have some
problems hearing, and of course it is that much harder to control a pile-up.
And a pile-up is exactly what I had! I was spotted, which was good, but it
usually means that folk that can't even hear me also start calling and
causing confusion.
I struggled on with it, and had some nice mults call me, but as is often the
case, there are some EU big guns that think it is good to work me, then sit
right up close and call CQ themselves.
I also had troubles with folk not wanting to wait, and would call me
mid-exchange, and then call again when I asked for a repeat.
Well, that run saw me hit 700 at 1839, so I decided that 750 was reachable.
In the end, I managed 761, so I was more than pleased with that.
I was sorry to miss out on a QSO with Steve AI9T, as he just could not get
my serial. I did try looking for you later, but couldn't find you anywhere.
Many thanks to all for the points, it was certainly fun!
Here is what I managed this time:
Band QSOs Pts
-----------------
80: 77 322
40: 227 938
20: 301 717
15: 156 395
10: 0 0
-----------------
Total: 761 QSO's, 2372Pts, 480 Prefixes.
Total Claimed Score = 1,138,560
Op time - about 21 hours.
Looking back, I see I made 852 QSO's in 2008 for 1,163,988 points, so I did
better this year!
My log is already on LoTW.
73 all,
Phil GU0SUP
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