[3830] NAQP SSB KB9OWD Single Op LP

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                    North American QSO Party, SSB - August

Call: KB9OWD
Operator(s): KB9OWD
Station: KB9OWD

Class: Single Op LP
QTH: WI
Operating Time (hrs): 8.5

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
  160:           
   80:   56    23
   40:  307    51
   20:  133    40
   15:   16    12
   10:           
-------------------
Total:  512   126  Total Score = 64,638

Club: Society of Midwest Contesters

Team: SMC Picnic Basket

Comments:

I found out basically the evening before that I would have to be into work at
midnight local time for a 4 hour shift so that threw things all off for me. 
Midnight turned in to 11 local during the contest, so that hurt even worse.  

The bands early on were poor from here at best.  No signals at all on 10 and
and very few on 15.  Surprisingly, the few QSO's on 15 were mostly short skip. 
Right out of the gate, KC0W in ND was huge, about 30 over 9.  Worked WD0T in SD
and a few MN also right away.  Later in the evening, found EU open with one
station in France calling "CQ NAQP".  With the work situation at play, I could
not plan an off time strategy as I would simply have to push straight thru. 
Had that not happened, I would have taken some early time off to hope things
would improve. 

The other impact work had was the I operated from home.  The plan was to try
and go over to the W9BCV (SK) QTH which is still assembled with family living
at the home.  I have recently been told that the station is going to stay up
there for the time being and given an invite to operate it as I want as it's
simply gathering dust currently.  With the work plans changing things, I had to
operate from home, where the only antenna is a G5RV up about 30 feet or so at
the peaks.  The W9BCV QTH also has been untouched for about a year and a half
now and will need some work to get back going.

20 is always a struggle from here with the minimal antenna.  As the day wore
on, conditions seemed to rebound a bit.  40 was the band for me and many others
I see.  I felt loud there and held a frequency for long stretches with some good
rate.  With the work plans as they were, I was forced to go to 80 quicker than I
wanted to.  This was a sacrifice to the rate a bit but I needed to bag some
mults there.  Alot of folks I think were just headed to 80 when I had to QRT
about 0315Z.  Still, was happy to work the several I did there.

I had several successful moves from 40 to 80 in the last hour.  Overall, I
would say about 70% of the moves I requested worked.  I recall VE4 early from
20 to 40.  I tried moving several AR stations in the last 15 minutes however
none seemed to work out.  Thanks to all that did move around.

One major problem I had was finding WI anywhere.  I did not work a single WI
until about 0200Z when K9BTQ called in on 80.  I tried a move to 40 with no
success.  Thankfully Pat, WW9R called in a bit later and we successfully made
it to 40 however that was my only WI QSO there and only 4 total overall.

The rates in my last hour or so were the best all day.  As said earlier, had
the work thing not gotten thrown in the mix, I would have played it out right
with early off times and as good as 80 and 160 sounded to be, think I could
have easily added another 100 or so QSO's and could have made roughly the 90K
mark.  Ah, next time!

Thanks for all the QSO's and moves and to Pat, WW9R for putting the teams
together!  See you in the next one!

73,

Ryan KB9OWD


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