[RTTY] GU0SUP Roundup story

[Phil Cooper]

Hi all,

Heavy rain and strong winds made starting on the low bands impossible, so I
got up early on Sunday morning, and it was still raining and blowing, plus
there were strong static crashes, so the low bands were out for me. My
dipoles were banging around in the gales, and the resulting SWR was very
poor on both. On both 40 & 80, I had S9+ of noise, and could hear very few
stations. I did have a quick listen around 1600UTC on Saturday, and found
40m pretty much unusable, and there was nothing audible on 80m at that time.
By the start of the contest at 1800UTC, the noise had increased
dramatically.
We have had over a week of gales and torrential rain, and it's not over yet!

I started on 20m, and found propagation rather odd. Some stations were S9+
when I called them, and they came back barely readable. At around 1200UTC,
things started to pick up with W/VE starting to come in. 10m was very
patchy, and as mults only count once, there was little incentive to stay and
try calling CQ.

15m was OK, but for me, 20m was the money band, where I picked up many
States and Provinces. Surprised to work ON/PA and G on 20m too. That's never
a good sign for propagation, yet I still worked VE7CC, plus several W7's and
even W6.
I could not hear Don AA5AU, which surprised me, although I could see him
being worked.

On the upside, mults only count once, not once per band, so it was easy to
spend most time on 20m. I did quite a bit of CQ'ing, but probably spent the
last couple of hours that I was active just mult hunting.
As I had been off work since Christmas eve, and was to be back at work today
(Monday 4th), I had a few things to get ready, the XYL was packing up the
decorations, so cooking the Sunday meal was down to me. I ended up making my
last QSO around 1740UTC, with 230 Q's in the log.

All in all, good fun, but the weather made it harder than it needed to be,
but a pleasant way to end 10 days off work!

Class: SO Unlimited LP
Operating Time (hrs): 9

Summary:
 Band  QSOs
------------
   80:    0
   40:    0
   20:  176
   15:   48
   10:    6
------------
Total:  230  State/Prov = 37  Countries = 41  Total Score = 17,940

Club: DL-DX RTTY Contest Group

73 all

Phil GU0SUP


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