Wow.
This year was spent at N1LN operating under the NC Contesters Club Call NR3X. The three man team[N4YDU, N1LN, W4KAZ] was a group formed to put N1LN’s station on the air for the contest after failing to find the ops required to run the preferred M/2. I’m sure glad we didn’t let the opportunity slip by – lots of fun.
Propagation conditions were very good for this contest – the best I have caught in several years. Improved conditions and lots of active stations made the bands wall-to-wall donald duck essessbeee chaos. Very difficult to copy weak stations, but there were lots of LOUD signals too. Heard many layers of QSOs on the same frequency.
Lots of little fun facts trickled in during the course of the weekend. Made the mistake of trying to switch from 15m to 20m too early – and lost a high rate run. Lesson: Next time listen to N4YDU! Made the mistake of giving up too easily on “terrible” high QRM run frequencies. Lesson: Don’t move before the rate plummets! Beast it like N4YDU!
This contest, I made it a point to move the antennas around more often when the rates slowed and was rewarded with small boosts in the rate several times. Still not enough experience to know when to look for openings in directions other than EU, but sliding the beams 20 degrees either side of directly at Central EU usually found a few new ones hiding in the favored directions.
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Continue reading 2011 CQ WPX SSB