[SD-User] Raem Contest.

[brian coyne]

Thanks Sid for flagging this up, it was fun, a contest for proper cw ops, machine/skimmer/screen readers would not have got past first base! The exchange without 599 (although many used it) was 9/10 characters/digits which was often tough to copy through qsb and qrm, lots of repeats needed.

I used a general file, 'Bill Windle' which did not do any scoring, just logged the q's with plenty of room for the exchange. The rules said don't worry about the score which is just as well since they would get few submitted logs! 

Duration times seemed a bit odd but as far east Russia is 12 hours ahead of gmt I guess they have done their best to get a level playing field, I was hearing scores of 600 towards the end.so many were obviously able to work multi band.

I did single band 20m,which opens around 0630 local time (z+2hrs) it was hard work with low power, the band was unstable as muf struggled to reach 14mhz and then fell back through it. Did get plenty of UA9/0's but only 2 Ja which would have helped the score out if that path had opened as distance gains extra points (typically reliable from here most mornings for 2/3 hours) unlike cqww when I had a shedload worth only 1 pt each!. Really struggled with eu, very few UA3/4/6, Ukraine either.

Finished with 160 q's, not a clue about the score but who cares, it was enjoyable.

SD worked fine, there was one odd little quirk, to avoid confusion in logging the longitude where the abbreviation 'O' was used for East, I used lower case 'o' but often it appeared in upper case. That won't be a problem to the cabrillo contest checking prog though.

Happy New Year to all in the group.

73  Brian     C4Z   (5B4AIZ).