[VHFcontesting] 2M sprint

[Chet, N8RA]

This is usually a fun event, and it indeed was last night. Being focused on
just one band it offers a good chance to test drive your station there. Rain
and lightening moving through the area during most of the afternoon
threatened to wash out my participation, but by the 7 PM start time it had
moved on through. However, propagation did not seem particularly good;
conditions seemed OK at the beginning but then grew worse as time went on. 

At the start, my transmitter would not produce any output on SSB- oh no, why
did I not check this earlier!! After confirming all its relevant menu
settings, I finally found that the mic input to the computer sound card was
muted, and that is the source for the  SSB audio - duh. I then operated for
about 2 hours, and there seemed to be a good mix of regular big guns and
casual ops and even some new callsigns showing up. But later when there was
not a single reply to 30 minutes of constant CQing, I decided to stop. After
that I would occasionally tune the band, and propagation to the distant big
guns who were still CQing seemed poor.

Most stations were exchanging 6 digit grid squares and it was fun to
actually copy something the computer did not already know- hi!

I worked 57 Q's in 18 grids. The best DX was to W3PN at 303 miles, followed
by a couple of others around 270 miles. 

Thanks for the Q's, thanks to the sponsors, and hope to see you all down the
road. 

73
Chet, N8RA