Guess we saved the best night for last in terms of openings to NA.
In case anyone is interested, the final totals were 260 QSO's, 9 zones,
and 39 countries. Of the 260 topband QSO's, 31 were with North America,
220 with Europe, and 9 others. Unfortunately, there were no QSO's with
JA or Asia/Pacific. I missed two night of operating. One due to a
local storm and another because of my alarm clock.
It's clear based on several e-mails that signals into NA were
pretty good for the most part. The biggest obstacle was the other
direction and the noise/receive conditions in JY. At times I could here
others calling but there just wasn't enough signal to overcome the
noise. It was fascinating to hear stations pop out of the noise just
enough to get the call and complete the exchange before they would go
back under again. The MFJ noise cancelling unit was able to knock the
noise down from S8 to S3 but it seemed to take the CW signals with it.
I was having better luck copying stations through the S8 noise than I
was with the unit in line. I guess if I had more time, I might have
been able to fine tune it and improve the singal to noise ratio a bit.
My apologies to those who I couldn't pull out of the muck. On the
bright side, George, JY9QJ, is on most mornings well before his sunrise.
With any luck, there will be some more decent openings before the end of
the season.
73
Ken K4ZW/JY8ZW
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