[3830] ARRL 10 N8II SO Mixed HP

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                    ARRL 10-Meter Contest

Call: N8II
Operator(s): N8II
Station: N8II

Class: SO Mixed HP
QTH: WV
Operating Time (hrs): 18.4

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
   CW:  832   113
  SSB:  485    91
-------------------
Total: 1317   204  Total Score = 876,792

Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club

Comments:

I still had a fairly good time, but it was a more frustrating effort than
expected. An outbreak of poor ops during the best conditions Saturday AM on CW
did not help. With the limited openings Q's lost are never regained. I also
felt like I needed more fire power, just not loud enough to work much
backscatter on Sunday like I did last year. Despite loud scatter at 15Z Sunday,
I was unable to generate a phone run. I missed many USA mults on SSB, got most
all of the non-backscatter ones.

Conditions were better than I expected, but pretty far down from 2013-2014. By
the numbers you would have expected Sunday to be better with increased SFI to
123 and lower K (1-2), but Saturday with a K of 3 and lower flux was definitely
better. I have observed that southern EU is definitely better on 10 with a K of
3 vs. 0-1 lately, very consistent. From here I was working EU over the south
Atlantic/AF right from when I fired up at 1225Z Saturday, but the direct path
opening started at 1353Z with a CR7 and ended essentially by 16Z with last EU
an IK0 at 1610Z. I never worked anything from north EU unless you count about 3
GM's. DL and SP were best DX to the north otherwise, did get US5 which I missed
in the WW and worked TA2 and 4X. We had some Es into possibly TX and definitely
MN (worked 27, seemed like more) and ND/MB mid day Saturday and some more into
the Canadian maritimes Sunday from 1215 until about 1330Z, but even that did
not help much into EU Sunday. The band never opened well into EU all morning
and I worked probably less than 10 new EU Q's on SSB and not much better on CW.
For fairly short stretches, I had some decent runs the the west Sunday
especially on SSB and CA was in longer than last year (140 total Q's), but skip
was long. One positive was several XE callers on CW and a couple on SSB. On CW,
I missed WV!, ND, SD and AK, too many to count on phone! Between both modes was
lucky to catch all VE provinces except VY0. I found VE8 loud enough on phone
late Sunday probably about 10 minutes before he was gone for good. Besides top
dawg CA, popular states were AZ 82 Q's, WA 73, MD 60, VA 50 (MD and VA are
locals).

WX was fantastic, 72 F on Saturday! So, I was off about an hour Saturday and 90
minutes Sunday afternoon with luch and walking with dog and XYL. I had a holiday
dinner with XYL's mom Saturday PM which cost probably another slow hour of
operating. By 22Z Sunday, the west coast was essentially totally gone, less
than 15 minutes past sunset. We had no Es at night when we really needed it and
none to FL at all which is extremely unusual.

I am really growing weary of "button pushers" on CW. If all you can
do is push buttons, at least have some extras ready to go and know how to use
them! The following example happened at least 4-5 times mainly during the EU
Saturday run.
Multiple callers, I send "IK5?", still multiple callers, "IK5A?
599 WV", he sends no call, just "599 123", I send
"CL?", he sends "599 123  599 123", I send "no,
call?"; then I finally get it! When in doubt do not transmit, please. 

I had some significant line noise from about 80 degrees south around to 270, so
sorry if I missed you. It probably caused me to beam away from SW for best
scatter, but did not cost me as many Q's as not being able to generate scatter
runs and not being heard on scatter on SSB. Some guys are really poor listeners
or suffering really high noise levels. And then there was the VE mult on CW with
his unattended CQ's, very annoying. Overall the VE's were very good listeners, I
worked many VE3's on scatter. Without more Es/meteor scatter, this contest will
be pretty slow at the bottom of the cycle. Thanks for reading and the Q's and
see you in the tests in 2016.

73, Jeff


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