Date: Sun, 12 Mar 2023 23:36:16 GMT

Well I feel somewhat fragilistic (with apologies to Julie Andrews) this morning.

I did the 24 hours but can’t account for a few hours when I fell asleep at the rig !

It seemed to me that someone switched off the ionosphere immediately prior to the start of the contest when 10m which had been very lively just suddenly closed.

However, it did come back to life on Sunday quite reasonably.

80m has to have been the worst I it has ever been. Not only did I not work any G stations I did not hear any either.

40m was made very difficult by being crowded with all the very strong illegal phone stations.

20m and 15m were very consistent throughout and often signals on 15m seemed to be both long path and short path at the same time.

Judging from some of the VE and G QSO numbers, I guess that conditions were better in the northern hemisphere. However VK6LW (VK6T) and VK2IA (VK1A/4) also racked up pretty high numbers so it will be interesting to see their scores.

Overall, I am reasonably satisfied with my score. There was only one country that I heard but did not work. That was 5H in the guise of a very weak 5H6. Yet again I neither worked nor heard a single ZS.

My result is as follows:

Band  QSOs  Bonus QSOs  Pts

———————–

  80:    15           15             375

  40:     80           41          1220

  20:  168            51          1860

  15:  142             43         1570

  10:  106              53        1590

———————–

Total:  511            203       6615

Much better than last year when I was only able to do 12 hours because I was recovering from a severe bout of glandular fever.

Thanks to the HQ stations and everyone else for lots of QSOs.

Barry Simpson  VK2BJ