[UK-CONTEST] WPX RTTY G0HVQ

[Darrell G0HVQ]

 Band    QSOs    Pts  WPX
   3.5      98     402   67
     7     164     730  106
    14     246     595  138
    21      80     188   31
 Total     588    1915  342
Score: 654,930

SOAB LP - 90W to a ground-mounted 4BTV plus low dipole for 80m, about 25hrs on air.

Highlights
---------------

- 15m in good shape, particularly Sat morning, didn't expect the big signals I tuned onto to be JA6ZPR and XW1B. Couldn't break the wall of east Europeans for YB3MM though.

- nice to be called by 7Z1SJ on 20m a couple of hours into darkness.

- KH7XS on 20m for a new one on RTTY

- 40m reasonable, last 3 QSOs approaching midnight were J7N, VU2NKS and YV1ALT.


Lowlights
-------------

- had hoped to knock up an 80m vertical but ran out of time, got it up but it resonated on 4.8MHz and it was getting dark, so abandoned for now.

- shack PSU blew up a few weeks back and I replaced it with one off eBay, seemed OK in the past few weeks, except I'm not a regular on 80m.....tuned to 80m during pre-contest testing to find S9+20dB of hash from the shack PC, wasn't there in AFS so must be the new PSU. Seems to be radiating from MF up to about 5MHz. Had to drag the family PC into the shack and setup N1MM & MMTTY in a hurry.

- 20m a bit disappointing, no JAs and the usual West Coast stations didn't emerge at dusk, although Sat was quite good into darkness.


All in all, good fun and a better score than last year. 

73
Darrell G0HVQ