Hello all: Hope everyone had a great time in GQP this weekend. It is
increasingly evident to me that the real way to enjoy this contest is to
operate mobile from a number of counties, especially if you have a good
set up on both modes. Otherwise, unless conditions are unusually good,
you will run out of people to work. I don't have too many ideas as to
how to promote activity, particularly among out of state stations, more
than we have already done.
One thing that did occur to me is that we don't do a very good job of
rewarding those who submit logs with timely, written results. In 1999,
I took the info from K4EA, which was a little spotty, and developed it
into a report, which KT4ZB mailed out with the certificates. I don't
know if it was mailed to those who did not earn a certificate. I
suspect not, but Jere can advise us about that. If Jere didn't do it, I
don't think anyone did it. Those results were posted on the URL, but
not everyone has access to the internet or knows to look for the results
on the reflector.
For 2000, I have a copy of the complete results from NE4S, but I don't
they were mailed out at all. I think the certificates were sent alone.
The complete results were to be posted on the URL, but have not been
yet, due mainly to the problems in Feb at contesting.com.
We do not, at best, send out a very informative report that would
encourage guys to return next year. For a example of how this can be
done (maybe overdone) see the FCG webpage for results from FQP. Mike or
someone else needs to develop a written report of the GQPs as they occur
and these should be mailed with the certificates, or separately, and
mailed to everyone who sends in a log, whether it is a winner or not.
We can add a requirement of sending in $1.00 for a copy of the results,
which some contests do, if expense is a problem.
I operated about the same time this year as last (17 hours). I had
reviewed last year's log before the contest and wondered how I could
possibly improve on it. (This said, I was beat last year by N4PN
running low power and wires.) I didn't beat last year's. For one
thing, I made less of an effort to move multipliers from SSB to CW and
vice versa than last year and that was a mistake. I thought the mults
would come, but I ran out of QSOs Sunday afternoon. Sunday afternoon
was terribly slow and painful. So I took Weesie to a minor league
baseball game and missed the last 1 1/2 hours. I did work (thanks
NJ4U/M) the last GA county that I didn't have confirmed after nearly 47
years.
The mobiles did a wonderful job and should have made the contest a
success for the out of staters. Thanks to all involved. I hope we got
all counties activates. Hope Mike can tell us from the logs how close
we came.
Here are my results:
Band CW QSOs PH QSOs
80 26 4
40 142 36
20 182 353
15 49 14
10 11 18
ALL 410 425 = 835 x 92 (43 CW 49 PH mults) =
114,540.
This compares to last year's 122,800 with 100 mults. Last year I had
fewer CW QSOs, more SSB QSOs and more mults on both modes.
Longer skip this year than last was evident. Even during the day, the
GA stations on 40 were often much weaker than stations further out.
Even though I worked a lot of close in (NC and FL and VA stations) on
20, there were times when the bread and butter 8s, 9s, etc were skipping
over us. I worked a lot of Europe and also a UA9, but not JE1TSD. Tosy
visits the Atlanta area often (and has visited W8JI) and was specially
looking for GQP QSOs.
Hope everyone has a good week.
This was High Power (500 watts output) with a TH6DXX, dipoles and a
General class frequency restriction.
73,
John, K4BAI.
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