[3830] ARRL 10 K5NA SO CW HP

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                    ARRL 10-Meter Contest

Call: K5NA
Operator(s): K5NA
Station: K5NA

Class: SO CW HP
QTH: Texas
Operating Time (hrs): 33

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
   CW: 1222    64
  SSB:           
-------------------
Total: 1222    64  Total Score = 313,344

Club: Central Texas DX and Contest Club

Comments:

This year’s 10M Contest was the best start that I have ever experienced in a
10M Contest. I was astounded when I started with a first hour on CW making 184
QSOs (It actually peaked at 187/hr between 0004Z and 0104Z). The 10M band was
open to all of the Midwest plus W4 and W6 with some W7. By the time I went to
bed at 06Z, I had 531 QSOs which was my best ever Friday evening from Texas.

Saturday was a different story and conditions turned poor again. The ionization
cloud would spring up every now and then while moving around. It seemed that I
would work a bunch of folks from one area and then another area would take
over. As an example, for a while I was only working PA stations and then
something would move and I would be working only VE3s. It was an interesting
experience hearing propagation move from place to place.

Some observations: 

Every ham in SC must like the 10M Contest and get on for it. Also, I didn’t
realize that there were that many hams in FL. I seemed to have worked every one
of them too.

It was also interesting to note that when darkness fell again on Saturday, the
band opened widely again to the Midwest for a few hours. It would seem that the
10M Contest has turned into a nighttime contest That was certainly unusual.

But on Saturday evening, I made my big mistake. 

Now I am not necessarily superstitious, but some things should never be said or
done as a matter of habit or procedure. This is when I made my big mistake by
saying out loud that my noise level had been extremely low and that the recent
power company upgrade to 14.4 KV lines from 7.2 KV lines had cleaned out all of
the intermittent line noise that I used to hear. My wife, Susan, is always
telling me not to say or think things like that because of the "jinx" factor.
And she is absolutely right!

Sunday morning I got up, turned on the radio, and was hearing a terrific line
noise coming from the east and southeast. It was the kind of crackly, S9
strength, noise that the noise blanker cannot do anything with. For my entire
Sunday the noise was usually there, only dropping out intermittently for about
5% of the total time of that day. It was bad enough that it even affected
signals coming from the other directions if those signals were weak. And during
the day most signals were weak except for an occasional loud caller that would
surprise me.

I know that I missed callers on Sunday that decided that I was "deaf" and moved
on. I am sorry about that. Because of the noise I am not really sure what the
10M conditions were actually like on Sunday.

Overall for the weekend I missed 5 states (RI, VT, CT, AK, and HI). I heard
W1WEF in CT but he was calling someone and I couldn’t get his attention. He
was the only multiplier that I heard and missed. I only managed to work two
Canadian provinces and they were VE3 and VE5. Strangely, I worked a lot of
stations in both those provinces but no other Canadians. The DX that I heard
and worked was CE, CX, HC, HK, KP2, KP4, LU, PJ2, PY, PY0F, VK, VP5, VP9, XE,
YV, ZL, and ZS. No Europeans, Asians, or any other DX multipliers were heard.

For those of you that follow my usual book reading (while CQing) during the 10M
Contest, I finished the last 10 percent of an Elizabeth George murder mystery on
Saturday. Then I started another, reading only about 20 percent of the new book
by the end of the contest. This was not as much reading as pervious years
because it was much harder hearing signals through the line noise on Sunday.
This required more attention to the radio trying to pull out signals. It is
really easy to read when the band is quiet and you can always tell when someone
is calling you, but really hard to do when each CQ requires your entire
attention.

But then, I really shouldn't be reading during a contest anyway. But it is my
way of dealing with extremely slow QSO rates and a closed band. Otherwise, I
would probably be nodding off while CQing.

73, Richard - K5NA


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