[3830] ARRL 10 VA7ST SO CW LP

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                    ARRL 10-Meter Contest

Call: VA7ST
Operator(s): VA7ST
Station: VA7ST

Class: SO CW LP
QTH: 
Operating Time (hrs): 7

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
   CW:  212    41
  SSB:           
-------------------
Total:  212    41  Total Score = 34,768

Club: 

Comments:

Hard work much of the time, with bursts of great conditions to the SE. Saturday
morning by far better than Sunday morning, which opened up nearly 2 hours later
than Saturday here in B.C.

Had two warnings on Sunday that my signal was bad. Anyone recall obersvations
about how bad this FT920 was? Never ever had a problem before. Had the RF power
at about 90% of full into a flat SWR on the yagi, but backed away to 60-70% just
in case the rig was balking at making clean full power on 10M. 

I am hoping it wasn't the rig but rather the Level 8 Aurora playing games with
my signal -- makes it raspy and buzzy (still, I appreciate hearing if my
transmitter is coughing up furballs). As conditions weren't giving me any
northern stations to compare with, I don't know if it was Au or not. Everything
checked out OK at this end.

Experienced curious spotlight propagation -- I'd work only FLs, then only TX,
then only MS... then back to FL. Didn't work as many SA as I thought I would.

Guess on 10M the receiver is a little less selective than on lower bands, as
many signals seemed very wide. With 400+250 filters on I could hear stations
from 2 Khz down the band. Not a problem I've noticed before.

Worked very hard Friday night to eke out a single QSO -- K7BG had great ears; it
took us several go-rounds to get finished but we did. Was having a grand old
time tuning around a totally dead band, and hearing the pings of signals popping
up and disappearing (meteor scatter, I assumed) -- long enough for a character
or two of a callsign before fading away, but at least I knew someone somewhere
was making Qs at night.

Worked three of the four ZLs I heard on Saturday afternoon, as the band was
falling off. No VKs, Asia or Europe heard.

Submitting my log for Multi Single category, as I had the telnet window on most
of the time to see what was happening. Ran CW only so it's not a great category,
but I wasn't competitive anyway, so it works for me. The N1MM bandmap spots kept
my interest when the band was stone cold dead here. Seeing as I ended up mostly
calling, and S&P using the spots wasn't much fun (rarely heard the spotted
stations), Assisted wasn't much of an assist but at least tracking what others
were working gave me something to do in the long breaks between callers.

SP5CFD has a great little Windows program for visual CW tuning: CW Tune In. 
Highly recommend this effective tuning aid. I noticed some stations calling in
rather high or low. A 400hz filter ought to be wide enough for callers within a
reasonable catchment either side of me, but several times I had to shift up or
down to catch 'em. As the logger checkers may confirm, on a busy band doing this
may mean advertently working more stations than worked me, hi.

http://www.spdxc.org.pl/index.php?option=com_docman&Itemid=56&task=view_category&catid=23&order=dmname&ascdesc=ASC

On the heels of another break-in report of "bad signal," I hit the kill switch
at about 1:30 p.m. Sunday and called it a weekend. 212 Qs for 41 mults is up
from 36 for 20 mults last year. I am happy, given the conditions. 

Big contest weekend up next. If nothing else gets in the way, I will be in RAC
Winter, OK DX RTTY, and Stew Perry. Hope to roll out an E-W beverage for 160M to
raise my chances for some Qs with the Inverted-L.


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