Did not expect to be able to put the time in for this one, but enough things shifted around at the end of the week that it worked out. Murphy showed his face in the form of a broken headphone jack on the homebrew SO2R headphone audio jack, which I broke at 1805z as I plugged the headphone cable in.  Not off to a smooth start. The jack is actually intack, it just became separated from the cover of the home-brew SO2R box.
Better to log Q’s than pull the box from the patch cord rats’ nest, so that fix has to wait. So no S&P2R. 🙁
Conditions here seemed good. 10m and 15m had decent signals, even if I couldn’t get a run going. After about 3:00pm local, 20m started to go short without losing the long, and seemed to be open to everywhere in North America at once. Worked TX, CA, NY, SK and SC almost back to back right before I took a dinner break at 4:45pm local.
No runs on 10m or 15m. 20m run was decent, and the unusual mixed bag of stations from everywhere kept me there when I should have migrated to 40m. Should have started the contest on 20m and migrated to 40m much earlier. 40m was long by the time I got there, so I moved down to 80m after short 40m pass. 80m was pretty good, nice and quiet here in the KazShack, and lots of solid signals. Nice 80m run. 160m was also nice and quiet, with good signals. The K9AY was hearing better down on 160 than the xmit antenna, even with low QRN. Too bad 160m condx were not as good as that for Stew Perry.
The 80m S&P was a blast. Keeping a 50/hr rate was easy. Not having the SO2R was a bit of a downer. With the good conditions on all bands, S&P2R would have really been a lot of fun. The 40m totals would have been bolstered with the second radio. I think I’d have been able to hit that goal of a 60Q hour of all SS&P if the SO2R box had been on-line.
Didn’t really set any goals other than to have some fun. DONE!
But still only half as many Q’s as the Top Gunz……and it is certain THAT ain’t because of Murphy.
The Good:
- Good conditions on all bands – compared to recent years.
- Lots of Fun
- 5:00pm Hamburger break…yummy
- 416 Q’s and only one TEBOW
- Good to see some interest in fielding PVRC teams
The Bad:
- SO2R not available. Fun value not gathered in as well as it might have been otherwise.
- CW copy needs work.
- Too lazy to do the work to improve the CW
- muffed the off times, so erred on the side of staying inside the rules. 9 hours rather than 10
The Ugly:
Oh, probably the language used when I broke that #@%%*&!! headphone jack. The jack separated from the panel. The repair might be a case of filling the hole with JB Weld and re-drilling it. It looks like the plastic panel face is reamed out.
The final “Final”:
Call: W4KAZ Radios: SO2R Summary: Band QSOs Mults ------------------- 160: 61 23 80: 154 43 40: 61 31 20: 106 41 15: 26 9 10: 8 8 ------------------- Total: 416 155 Total Score = 64,480
73 es tnx fer q’s and fills de w4kaz
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