What an amazing BERU! I haven’t heard conditions like those in many years. Eighty seemed poor, and 40m was a little poorer than usual, but the phenomenal openings on 10 and 15 more than made up for it. I made several QSOs with ZL and VK on 15m after local midnight!

BERU always has a relatively small pool of stations to work, spread across the whole globe. That is part of the fun. Openings to multiple regions can be challenging. One very fun thing was having the 20m long path opening to ZL and VK coincide with the regular opening to G on a broadly similar bearing.

If there was an award for the longest call sign in BERU, it would be a tie: 5B/G3TXF and 5B/G3VYI. Thank you to Nigel and Mike for making Cyprus very available.

This was my first serious BERU from my new location, and the first time I’ve gone “Assisted.” It’s also the first BERU from VE3, so that normal deep well of VE3 QSOs was missing from my log. The much better propagation to G, ZL and VK more than made up for it. One plus about being a VE3 is that I get fewer non-BERU callers than I did from VE9, VO2, VO1, ZL7 or 9M6 in previous BERUs.

I am very grateful to those ops who were willing to change bands. I got more bonuses, and all they got was just another VE3 in the log. Brian 9J2BO stands out as always being willing to move on request. Thank you, Brian.

The conflict with the Tesla contest on 40 and 80 and the South American contest on 10 metres was less of an issue this time.

Thank you to Bruce WA7BNM for updating the BERU form on the 3830scores page. It still needs a tweak, but it’s great to have a column to report bonuses now.