[3830] ARRL 10 K9CT M/S HP

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                    ARRL 10-Meter Contest

Call: K9CT
Operator(s): K3WA, K9CT, K9ZO, K9QQ, LU7DW
Station: K9CT

Class: M/S HP
QTH: IL
Operating Time (hrs): 24

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
   CW:  884   116
  SSB:  504    87
-------------------
Total: 1388   203  Total Score = 922,432

Club: Society of Midwest Contesters

Comments:

Interesting weekend! Team was K3WA, K9QQ, K9ZO, LU7DW and myself, K9CT. Claudio,
LU7DW was in Chicago area for training and had just arrived from LU. He drove
three hours and joined us for the last three hours of the contest. It was fun
to listen to him work SA in Spanish. We also had a contest visitor Bob, NW9X
Sunday morning. Bob is returning to contesting after retirement and wanted to
see our operation. 

Propagation was interesting to say the least. Almost everything but a blackout
occurred over the 48 hours. Obviously it was not as good as last year but still
it was interesting. You had to be in your seat the whole time or you might have
missed an opening LP or ? Quite a few DX surprises!!

We missed WY for WAS and did not get as many States on SSB. We asked several CW
stations to move but most seemed concerned about their CW only entry....which is
NOT a problem. This was the least successful in terms of getting more mults to
move than our previous experience. We were over 100 mults less than last years
effort. We only had 9 Mexican states...but that may be due to lack of prop that
direction. 

You were either lucky or not with the E openings. We watched Sunday afternoon
to the west coast working points east of us and did not hear a thing. Texas had
some good runs going to the east coast that we did not get either. Our best E
skip was probably Friday and Saturday evenings when we got some actual rate in
excess of 120 qsos per hour. 

We used a three stack of 8 element OWA for most of the running. The Steppir
DB42s were kept busy finding mults and the next opening. We also had a low 3 el
Steppir that we kept to Mexico and TX. Lots of qsos were made backscatter using
the stack...we simply could not work these mults any other way. 

Our only Murphy visit was loss of our Verizon internet connection 6 hours
before the test...and of course it did not work the entire weekend. Lots of old
fashioned digging for mults...plus we connected a modem to a laptop next to the
mult radio to track the spots on the VE7CC client...not exactly the best
situation. Of course, it now works on Monday morning...LOL. 

Thanks for the qsos. Some pretty good operators out there having lots of fun.
Best wishes to all for this holiday season. 

73, Craig K9CT


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