I thoroughly enjoyed a few hours in the SP event again this year despite the
contrast with last year's outstanding conditions. Though activity was down,
I heard a lot of "non-contesters" with great signals and worked a lot of
grids. DJ7AA, G3SED and IT9ZGY kept it from being a "NO-EU" night here, and
KH7R heard me on the first call. It was really tough to work the West Coast
until about 0430Z, even though many of them were loud.
Total damage: 174 Q's, 521 x 2 = 1042 points in about 4 hours.
On a related note, I want to thank all who responded to my posting about my
"inverted-L-gone-bad". The replies ranged from the scientific to the
humorous and all were appreciated! It seems that what I have been doing is
coupling to and radiating with the tower as well as from the wire. Changing
back to the 8" spacing between wire and tower gave me back my bandwidth
(actually, it's 110 khz < 2:1 SWR now!). I sure have a lot to learn here,
but golly, AIN'T IT FUN!!!???
73, Jim N9JF
Quote of the year:
"Umpires are like dairy cows. The bottom 20% should be culled each year."
Al Oppendal, Ruthven, IA in Nov. 16, 1998 _Sports Illustrated_
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