[RTTY] GU0SUP SOABLP BARTG

[Phil Cooper]

Evening all!

Well, conditions sucked! It is at times like this I wish I had biger, better
antennas, but that won't happen, so I have to stick with what I have. Such
is life!
I had planned on aiming for 500 Q's in this one, and around 300k points, but
it was soon clear this wasn't going to work. During the day, I slimmed that
down, and was just hoping to beat last years score!
This year, I missed out on a lot of mults on 15, so I wasn't sure it would
work. By the time I hot last years QSO tally, I was way short on points, but
made up some extra points towards the end from mults on 40.

I got up early on Saturday morning, hoping to catch some W/VE's on 80m, but
that plan went out of the window! 80m was totally dead here, so it was up to
40m. That only produced a few contacts while I waited for 20m to open.
Had to pop up to 15m for continent number 6, which was provided by YB2ECG,
which was great, but very few other signals on the band.
During the afternoon, I managed to get all 10 US call areas, which surprised
me. W6YX called me with a huge signal, and later on, KE7AJ was a good one
too. I even managed one whole QSO on 10m! Thanks to Heijo EA8/DJ1OJ. I did
try ZC4LI on 10m, but there wasn't even a hint of a signal (sorry Steve!)
Spent a while (probably too long!) trying to work TY5MR around 1700 on 20m,
but the pile-up was just too unruly.
I called it a day around 1930, as 20 was quiet, with only the big guns
audible, and already worked, 40m was full of SSB and CW signals in the
Russian DX test, and 80m was empty.
I did try getting up early on Sunday morning, but ended up not making it
into the shack until about 0640UTC.
Once I had checked the bands, I realised another hour or two wouldn't have
hurt!
80m had 2 audible signals, and 40m was also very quiet. 20m didn't open
until 0800, but at least I managed to find Andrea TY5MR, which was a new
band-slot for me! Thanks for that! I also found ZL2AMI, and then worked
TY5LEO as well.
The rest of Sunday was spent trying to work anything for points, and it was
hard work. There were some huge signals about, but most couldn't hear me,
yet some of the weaker ones got me first time, with no repeats.

I did spend some time CQ'ing, and had a few nice, but short runs. I also
wish some folk would listen to the process, and not call in the midst of an
exchange!
One DL station will get docked points for logging me when he worked the
station I was in QSO with!
Nice to see so many clocks reading pretty much the right time too! I think
the furthest off was only about 4 minutes, which was good.

There were a few things that seemed to bug me! One was stations sending the
same report back when you ask NR? AGN. A few stations never sent a TU QRZ?
but simply sent a CQ. And the other pet hate was stations resonding to my CQ
with their report, and after my TU QRZ?, they'd come back and ask for a
repeat, usually in the midst of a small pile.

Here is my claimed score:
	 QSOs	DX:	Call Areas
80m: 	38	21	0
40m:	106	35	5
20m:	190	44	17
15m:	6	5	0
10m:	1	1	0
Total:	341
Continents:		6
Total multipliers:	128
Score:			261888

Thanks to all for the points, they were most welcome!
My log is now on LoTW.

73 de Phil GU0SUP




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