[UK-CONTEST] ARRL CW

[Don Field]

My congratulations to those iron men who braved 80 and 160m this weekend. I
take my hat off to them!

A limited all-band high-power effort here (went to bed at night, rather
than struggle with LF, and various domestic distractions during the day).
But I do enjoy working North America on CW - generally excellent ops, so
good rates and nice to work plenty of old friends.

As has been mentioned, 10m was disappointing - a far cry from last autumn
in the two legs of CQWW or even the ARRL 10m contest. A few 10m QSOs on
Saturday, mainly to collect mults, then had to break off to look after
granddaughter for a while! Nothing on 10m on Sunday! 15m proved to be the
money band here - I don't think I have ever worked so many W6, W7, VE7 in a
single weekend, often much louder than East Coast. 20m wasn't bad either -
open pretty much from late morning until 9pm or later. I would expect
anyone who did single-band 20m to have some pretty respectable QSO totals.
Very noticeable that the Eastern Europeans have the run of things early on
each day, then propagation very much favours those of us in Western Europe
later in the openings - my best runs were very definitely after Eastern
Europe had started to lose propagation.

My claimed score as below. I think I worked all (mainland) states, but not
all on the same band! No VY1 or VE8.

    Band    QSOs     Pts  Sec
   1.8       9      27    6
   3.5      28      84   14
     7     121     363   31
    14     445    1335   55
    21     639    1917   55
    28      34     102   20
 Total    1276    3828  181

Score: 692,868

Station: FT-5000, Acom amp, 3-ele SteppIR at 60ft, 40m sloper, 80m inv-vee,
160m inv-L, all at 55ft. No separate rx antenna, something which I must fix
for LF.

Will be interesting to see how the UK multi-ops got on.

Don G3XTT