So, this weekend, I played around in the ARRL 10m Contest. Like most contests I enter, I didn’t try to compete seriously, but it was fun. It all started on Friday night when one of the people I follow on Twitter tweeted, “Getting ready for the 10m contest.” I thought to myself, “Hey…I haven’t hooked up the 10m loop for ages.”
I tweeted back, “Good idea. Think I’ll head outside and connect up the 10m loop.”
The contest started at 0000Z, but I didn’t get on until 0126Z. Since it gets dark here about 2230Z, I didn’t think that I’d hear much. I surprised myself, though, I made 11 contacts in about 40 minutes. The signals weren’t strong, but strong enough. The stations I worked were all domestic: OH, MI, NJ, VA, MA, WI, and TX.
I really wasn’t planning to operate much the next day, but it was snowing like crazy outside, and Dave, N8SBE, sent out an e-mail to our club’s mailing list that the band was open. So, after making some buttermilk pancakes from scratch for the XYL and me, I headed back down to the shack at about 1400Z.
Europe was booming in, and I racked up a bunch of countries, including at least one (Northern Ireland) that I hadn’t worked before. Also, since the loop is directional north and south in the haphazard way that I threw it up, I worked a couple of South American and Caribbean stations.
I operated until about 1800Z. One thing that I found interesting is the way the propagation changed. Early in the morning, the Europeans were strong. As the day wore on, they disappeared, but the West Coast stations took their place. You could almost feel how the ionosphere was changing by the stations being worked.
Sunday morning was much the same, except that I got on an hour later and had already worked many of the stations I was hearing. Nevertheless, I managed to work several new multipliers, including NS, Bermuda, Guernsey, and the Dominican Republic.
Adding those multipliers really boosted my score, but my attention was flagging. I decided that I would quit at noon or when I reached 50,000 points, whichever came first. At 11:55 am (1655Z), I had 49,128 points (178 Qs x 4 points/Q x 69 multipliers). I was just about to give up when I worked VY2TT at 1658Z. That put me over the top. I finished with 50,120 points (179 Qs x 4 points/Q x 70 mults).
I just uploaded my log to QScope, It reports that I operated for 7 hours, 26 minutes, yielding an overall QSO rate of 24.08 Qs/hr. My best rate for a 10-minute period was 48/hr on Saturday morning. Not terrific, but I had a good time doing it.
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