[RTTY] GU0SUP BARTG Contest

[Phil Cooper]

Hello one and all,

Hmmm. Seems that the Russian DX Contest overtook the bands for 24 hours!
I wasn't able to get started until almost 12 hours into the contest, and
when I switched on the rig, the bandscope looked like any other Saturday
with very few RTTY signals.
I spent some time in S&P mode, and worked whatever I could hear, but that
wasn't too much.
I stuck with it until about 1930, when I went in for tea, and to watch the
England/France rugby match. I did look again a bit later on, but 40m was
hopeless, with SSB down to 7040 and CW up to 7045! Nothing on 80m here
either, which surprised me.
On Sunday morning, I got up early-ish and the bands were very quiet, and
there were some comments on the cluster about whether it was the right
weekend!
Still, 20m was getting lively, and there were some JA's around, but it
seemed to be very slow going.
I called CQ quite a bit, but suffered from deliberate QRM on at least three
different QRG's. Up around 14.105 I had someone sending idles over my
signal, so I moved down to 14.091, and then had some idiot transmitting
PSK31 right on my Mark tone. I then went down to 14.082, and pretty soon had
another kind person sending a single tone, first on my Mark, then on the
Space. This time, I tried sticking with it, hoping he would get fed up, and
it did work for a while, but along came an RA3 in the RDXC hammering out
fast CW right between my tones.
Still, I had some fun, worked many friends, and worked quite a few for whom
I was clearly a new DXCC, which was even better.
Some nice runs into W6/7 and VE6/7, and also bagged all six continents quite
easily.
Sunday afternoon proved to be much better (once the RDXC had finished), so I
tried hard to bump up the QSO count with long periods of CQ'ing.
Although 15m was open, I never managed to get a run going there. 10m was
just plain dead here.
During Sunday evening, I hoped to bag a few contacts on 80m, which I did,
but it was very quiet, with very little activity.

Gripes: a great pity that the Russian DX Contest appears to have taken over,
and I also didn't appreciate the cluster "abuse" by 3 or 4 folk that I
called, who then spotted ME on their frequency!
There also seemed to be a lot of exchanges without callsigns this time.
As you will have noted, I was sending GW4SKA TU 599 001 001 001 1234 GW4SKA
DE GU0SUP
This was to try and overcome that problem of no callsigns, and it almost
worked. IZ3GOG kept sending me a report while I was trying to work others,
and he didn't heed the QRX message either. In the end, this caused a few
dupes in my log.

Anyway, here is what I managed:
 	 QSOs	DX:	Call Areas
80m: 	11	9	0
40m:	37	28	2
20m:	196	41	21
15m:	62	21	16
10m:	0	0	0
Total:	306
Continents:		6
Total multipliers:	138
Score:		253368


80m Summary
Countries
DL     EA     F      G      GW     I      PA     SV     YU

Call Areas

40m Summary
Countries
9A     DL     EA     F      G      GM     GW     HA     HB     I
JA     LA     LX     LZ     OE     OH     OK     ON     OZ     PA
S5     SM     SP     UA     UR     VE     YL     YU

Call Areas
VE2
JA1

20m Summary
Countries
4X     6W     CT     DL     EA     EA6    EA8    ES     EU     G
GW     HA     HB     I      IS     JA     K      KL     LA     LY
OE     OH     OK     OM     OZ     S5     SM     SP     SV     TF
UA     UA9    UN     UR     VE     VK     YB     YL     YO     YU
ZL

Call Areas
K0   K1   K2   K3   K4   K5   K6   K7   K8   K9
VK8
VE1  VE2  VE3  VE4  VE5  VE6  VE7
JA1  JA7  JA9

15m Summary
Countries
4X     5B     CM     EA8    FG     JA     K      KP4    LU     P4
PJ2    SV     TR     UA     UA9    UN     UR     VE     VU     YB
YO

Call Areas
K1   K2   K3   K4   K5   K6   K8   K9
VE2  VE3  VE4  VE5  VE6  VE9
JA1  JA7

Thanks to all for the points, and the fun, and see you in the next one!

73 de Phil GU0SUP


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