Topband: Annual visit from Stew Perry

[Tree]

It was great hearing all of the activity in the ARRL 160 contest.  I ended 
up with about 270 QSOs with perhaps about six hours of effort.  This is 
about the same QSO total I used to have with full time efforts back in the 
70's from W6.

That K9DX score is just amazing - and indicates that activity on 160 
continues to grow.  You can view some pictures of his antenna system
at http://nidxa.org/memberWWW/k9dx_antennas.htm.

Conditions certainly aren't as good as they were back during the sunspot 
minimum in the mid 1990's.  It seems so long ago that we were running 
Europeans at our sunrise!

We are looking forward to another record breaking year for the Stew Perry 
contest coming up the last weekend of December.  If you are not familar 
with this contest, a good place to start is to review last year's result.  
These did not make it into a printed magazine this year (we were going 
to be included in the NCJ, but they ran out of room).  The results are 
on the web at 

http://web.jzap.com/k7rat/2001.stew.results.html

The soapbox makes good reading.  

As Lew has already mentioned, now is the time to sponsor plaques for those 
categories you feel are worthy.  Send e-mail to Lew at lew@teleport.com to 
complete that transaction.  He is happy to accept payment in cash, check,
blood (especially type O) or plastic.

When submitting you log electronically, it will be received by a "robot".  
It would be a good idea to make sure your contest software is up to date 
and has this contest supported.  However, if there is something wrong, 
the robot will tell you what the problem is, and you can probably fix it
with a text editor (Notepad or Wordpad).

Complete rules are at http://web.jzap.com/k7rat/stew.html

Mark you calendars and notify your family - the next running is 1500Z 
December 28th to 1500Z December 29th UTC.

Note - the RAC contest runs from 0000 to 2359Z on December 28th.  As 
before, I am sure that the VEs will be happy to trade QSOs with you.  
They will want RST and a serial number for their logs.  

73 Tree N6TR
tree@kkn.net