[UK-CONTEST] Russian DX Contest

[G3SJJ]

Interesting to say the least. I hadn't worked out a strategy so decided 
to go for SOAB, MIX which allowed to me to have a look around the bands. 
Had a bad start as I was still trying to sort out a problem with the 40m 
phased array until 30 minutes in. After 6 x 250m round trips to the 
antennas, ie 1 mile in old money, I fixed the RF problem but introduced 
a dc fault. At that stage the battery on my test meter packed in, 
probably from cold(!) so I decided to go with the array fixed east.

In the end I did about 10 hours for 500 Qs which was slow but 
comfortable. Got QSOs in the log on all band/mode slots except 10m SSB 
despite seeing spots for various stuff in the Africa and the rest of Eu. 
20 and 15 were really buzzing during Saturday afterrnoon and I could see 
lots of DXy spots so it was easy to move around and pilc of some nice 
stuff. There was never a shortage of Russians to work even right up to 
the end, in fact I just missed RK2FWA on 10m CW, Chris G4BUE git him on 
one of the QSB peaks. Late Saturday evening was probably the worst time 
for me since I could see lots of spots for States on 40m but couldn't 
get at them with effectively a 20-25db tx/rx attentuator in towards the 
west.

Sunday morning I could see from WWV/WCY announcements on the Cluster 
that A index had gone up to 22 and a moderate storm predicted. True to 
form, 15m was almost empty but 20m was packed for both modes. Some 
observations :

1  Load of Russians to work but loads of DX as well, including JA, ZL, 
9V, HS, 9J.

1a Lots of Russian on SSB talking only in Russian.

2 Key clicks seems to be the norm! But then I heard two Ws in the week 
on 20m SSB who were spreading a good 20KHz.

3 Great contest for multi station / multi op

4 N1MM was really smooth and smart. Things like displaying single mults 
in red, double in green and new contact in blue. I particularly like the 
bit where as you tune over a station, it picks the call off the bandmap 
and displays it just above the Entry field. When you hit Enter it puts 
it in the Entry filed and sends the F4 message, your call.

Band  Mode  QSOs    Pts  Cty   Sec
  1.8  CW      44    230   17   13
  1.8  LSB      4     26    1    2
  3.5  CW      41    247   19   15
  3.5  LSB      9     64    2    3
    7  CW      63    312   22    9
    7  LSB     10     65    6    5
   14  CW     169   1261   20   33
   14  USB     71    421   17   18
   21  CW      88    680   18   29
   28  CW       1      3    1    0
Total  Both   500   3309  123  127

           Score : 827,250

Hopefully now the wx will improve so I can get on the all the jobs 
around the house and in the garden!!  G3SJJ