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George was very generous to offer me the opportunity to operate another big phone contest from his fabulous station in the Texas Hill Country. While I did a single band effort on 15 meters, George was initially planning to do a single band effort on 40 meters, but the allure of rate on 20 meters was too much, I think. He ended up doing an all-band effort where all the bands included only a handful of 15 meter QSOs made with the 160 meter inverted L antenna. In retrospect, maybe we should have done a multi-single, but this turned out to be a very interesting weekend on 15 meters after all.
The contest started off with a very fun 172 hour. I was working Canada, Japan, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and a few USA stations. Conditions to the continental USA were never again as good as they were in that first hour. My second hour included 74 QSOs, and my third hour only 14. I stuck it out calling CQ until my final contact of the evening at 0416 UTC.
On Saturday morning local time, the first station heard was in West Africa, but he could not hear me yet. My first contact of the morning was at 1225 UTC, a couple of minutes before official sunrise. For the next several hours, it was all South America and the occasional USA station that was also beaming to the south. In the 1300 UTC hour, I worked a few African stations including ZS, TR, TU, and ZD8.
My first European QSO of the day was at 1347 UTC, but by 1500 UTC I had only managed to get four Europeans in the log. The run to Europe did not really pick up until well into the 1600 UTC hour, and even then it only peaked at a 40 hour and a 51 hour. The rest of the day was pretty slow, with seven out of eight daylight hours producing fewer than 30 QSOs each. The first Japanese station was worked at 2133 UTC, but working stations in that direction was difficult because of line noise. The last Japanese station in the log that night was worked at 2324 UTC. The 0000, 0100, and 0200 UTC hours were mostly Australian and New Zealand stations with the occasional South American and USA station. My last station in the log that night was an Australian at 0222 UTC.
Sunday morning, I could hear stations well before they could hear me, including some USA stations. I heard a station in the Dominican Republic operating below the USA phone subband around 1225 UTC - he never did make it into my log. The first QSO of the morning was at 1237 UTC, but it was the second QSO of the morning that had me excited, as it was a loud Irish station. I worked a scattering of Europeans for the next hour, and things really began to take off around 1330 UTC, when I started working multiple stations every minute. I had five hours of 72, 116, 69, 58, and 67 QSOs, mostly to Europe. The USA stations I worked during this time frame were almost always harder to copy than the European stations that were calling. In the 1400 UTC hour, my second best hour of the contest, I actually had to switch to another run frequency as some sort of HF RADAR system came up centered a few kHz from my frequency and wiped out a good 40-50 kHz of the phone subband. That was very frustrating.
After a slow 20 QSO hour at 1900 UTC, conditions rallied and I began for the first time since the very first hour of the contest to work USA stations in any quantity. Two hours of 44 and 48 QSOs were much more fun than the 11 and 24 hours I had during the 2000 and 2100 UTC hours the day before. I only worked six Japanese stations on Sunday afternoon, and even fewer Australians and New Zealanders.
This was the first 48-hour HF contest I can remember operating in which I made more QSOs in the second 24 hours of the contest than I did in the first 24 hours of the contest. It is also the first world wide HF contest that I have worked in which I get points for USA stations, but I actually worked more DX stations than USA stations! 15 meters was very long a lot of the time, making most of my one point QSOs more challenging than the two and three point QSOs.
Contest Logging was done with TR LOG contest logging software. The following reports and log were created using TR LOG's post-contest processor.
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Last Updated 26 June 2020 wm5r@wm5r.org |