[NCC] V48M ARRL CW

[Nzharps at aol.com]

Hi all,
 
Returned last night from a great weekend on the radio. HUGE thanks to Alex, 
 W2OX/V47KP for inviting me to beautiful St. Kitts to operate 2011 ARRL CW  
with him as a M/2 entry from his world class station. 
 
Low band conditions on Wed & Thurs before the contest were  
tremendous..have never worked UA9/RA0's on 160m before during a EU  run!  Pre-contest 
pileups on all bands were unbelievable. Evidently V4 is  in great demand.
 
An island wide power outage on Friday morning caused a bit of concern,  but 
Alex has an 8kw generator on site. It took just a few minutes to bring  
that on line and pre-contest V47KP operation continued without a problem.  
Fortunately, service was restored after a few hours and was never an issue after 
 that. 
 
For me, meeting local hams is an important part of any trip outside the  
U.S. Alex introduced me to his friends Terry, V44KBP and Joel, V44KAI. It was 
a  pleasure spending time and getting to know them. Both of these  men are 
important to the success of any operation  from V47KP. 
 
The contest started slowly on Friday. I had expected the first few hours on 
 40m to be amazing. However, I ended up moving frequency 4 times in the  
first hour and that does not make for great rate. Saturday was another  story 
altogether. Spent 5 straight hours on 10m that resulted in 990  Q's..amazing 
rates on that band for the first day. Think we ended our first  24 hours 
with a total of 5000 QSO's! Sunday rates were considerably lower as  
conditions didn't seem to be as good..especially on 10m.
 
One issue that caused us concern during the weekend was what might kindly  
be called the "dupe problem." We had decided prior to the contest that we 
would  work all dupes (on Sunday we amended that to working most dupes).  
Numerous times during the contest a packet pileup would begin and a huge  
portion of the ensuing Q's would be dupes. The final total was a staggering 400+  
dupes that were logged on all bands. Apparently poor packet spotting is to  
blame, but one has to wonder if that is the only problem. I'll leave it to  
others to decide if there are other explanations.
 
Our rough totals (Alex will eventually post the final  numbers) for the 
weekend are as follows:
 
Band        QSO's        MULT        Logged  Dupes!
 
160            440            58                4
  80            557            53                10
   40           1405           59                121  !!
   20           1706           59                59
   15           2054           59                121  !! 
   10           1472           56                109
 
Totals        7594          344                424  !!!!!!!!!!!
 
Multi-2    7, 837,008
 
73,
 
Ron, K8NZ
 
Half of Team V48M
 
p.s. GD..Alex asked if you would please forward this to the FRC  reflector.