[UK-CONTEST] WPX - ON/G3VQO/P

[Les Allwood]

At the other end of the scale ....

I decided to make a brief sortie through the tunnel to air the relatively rare ON0 prefix, signing as ON/G3VQO/P. Time was limited, so I caught the 0628 shuttle and, by the time I was set-up and ready to go, had just about four hours of operating time. The location was a kilometre or two north of the French border, near the village of Beauvoorde. Rig was an FT847 running 50 watts into a selection of single-band mobile whips, mag-mounted on the car roof - you can get VERY wet changing bands!!!!

I started on 40m, but there was not too much activity there. I guess that most folks had already left for higher frequencies. The only UK station I heard was John G3WGV, who was fruitlessly calling PJ4U. Well, if John couldn't raise him, there was no hope for me!!!

Moving HF, 20m gave me the best value, although there were a few goodies to be found on 15m. I didn't try 10m at all as time was getting tight by that stage.

General impression, albeit based on a four-hour snapshot, was that activity was significantly down on other years. There were plenty of gaps to be found for CQ calls, and even the "big guns" seemed to be having a hard time finding QSOs. I also felt that there were fewer unusual prefixes around then usual in WPX - perhaps the novelty is wearing off.

I found none of the "alphabetic numbers" causing such discussion (other than the Ns and Ts, of course), but perhaps the fact that I was probably a unique multiplier for everybody caused them to be more careful!!! 

Sorry I didn't find more UK stations. Perhaps early retirement later this year will permit longer operations from across the channel from time to time.

CLAIMED-SCORE: 14076

40m    16 QSOs 15 mults
20m    79 QSOs 69 mults
15m    10 QSOs  8 mults

73 de Les, G3VQO