Sunday, October 29, 2006

 
CQ World Wide SSB Phone contest weekend...

The story so far...

+++++

Given very limited time this afternoon, and being kicked out of my shack due to a party being thrown by my XYL, I figured that 15m was going to be open in the afternoon.

So I throw a 15m ham stick onto my air. As long as I'm within 500 yards of the shack I'm good to go.

I practice at my daughter's horse lesson. The band is quiet, noise in the S0 to S3 range with LOTS of stations. Very tempting to work them for contacts and turn the log in as a check log. (I'm nowhere nowhere near competitive anyway.) But no, I'll be a good boy.

Get home, quick like a bunny copy down the already worked stations so I don't dupe, head back out the the car.

Sigh. Noise at S8 to S9. TOLD you my location is noisy.

So I run the band trying to make contact. Listened to about 10 stations, got contacts with none of them.

Turn off the rig and come back in for the remainder of the party. Not a happy ending.

Oh well, we've got Sweepstakes and a Spartan Sprint coming up.

+++++

Well after waking up I realized I've made two big mistakes:

  1. I didn't try to work the "split" stations on 40m. If there were stations in the US portion of 40m listening down, there were probably foreign stations listening up... Oh well... These things are a learning experience.
  2. I didn't get on 160m last night. Could have picked up some easy multipliers. Oh well... see above.
+++++

Well, it's past midnight and this "non-serious" contester's rate has dropped through the floor.

I'm a bit over 1700 points in about 5 hours in the chair. Still don't have a Europe or Africa.

Bob is all over the place...
Heard Kamal pick up a contact just before I dialed in. (At least I'm pretty sure I did.)
And "Radio Radio" was working 75 about 1/2 an hour ago.

Good night all, happy hunting and see ya tomorrow.

+++++

I know AE6RR is out there. Heard him make a JA contact.

Also heard Bob K6XX, made a quick call, but he was working a string of JA's so decided not to annoy him further.

I think I've got about 400 pts at the moment. Took me a while to figure out that working US stations wasn't worth anything except the multiplier. Rank beginner... That's me. In every sense.

Lots of JAs, some Argentinians.

Heard Germany earlier this morning but couldn't get to him. Grrr.

I'm only getting about 1/3 of the foreign stations I'm trying to call.

If I can make it in 6 or 8 go rounds I move on.

Right now seems a great time to work [far] east, but... it's dinner time.

There will probably be lots of VEs later tonight on 40m.

This is addictive. Wonder if I can WAC this weekend? Need Europe and Africa.

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