[UK-CONTEST] Russian DX Contest - corrected

[G3SJJ]

Darned Spilling Chocker. 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 
6x 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 Africa and the rest of Eu. 20 
and 15 were really buzzing during Saturday afternoon and I could see 
lots of DXy spots so it was easy to move around and pick off 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 got 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 attenuator 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  Loads of Russians to work but loads of DX as well, including JA, ZL, 
9V, HS, 9J.

1a Lots of Russians 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 field 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 with all the jobs 
around the house and in the garden!!  G3SJJ