Hi Bob
Well that was disappointing.
I think the weekend can be summed up by the fact I had more QSOs on 80m than I did 10m (not that I had a lot on either)!
Although I had high hopes and CQ’d a lot, 10m simply didn’t open for me and I only managed the VE big guns and some VK. Clearly 300W into a ground plane didn’t cut it.
A lot of signals in general had an auroral raspiness so I am guessing the recent geomagnetic activity and an A index hovering in the low teens were the reason.
The high points were being called by 9H6A, G4SGX/6Y, 6Y6YI and 5Z4VJ. Also I managed a nice wee run of G’s on 80m at my sunset (dipole up 18m), a run of Gs on 15m at midnight and a similar run on 20m in my early evening. I am claming a new record for being duped with it happening in the first 10min of the contest.
As others have noted I felt participation was down as well especially in VE and some VK regulars didn’t seem to be on either, but I did work an awful lot of Gs.
With regard to ZL it should be noted we have a very small pool of regular CW contesters. Even the CQ WW contest barely scrapes double figures so the 6-7 who were on in BERU isn’t actually a bad turn out by our standards.
For once I was only bothered by a couple of non-commonwealth callers. I suspect the other contest I heard on helped or perhaps they finally got the message with Brexit (still too soon?)
I had a goal of 300 qsos to match last year but it became apparent quite early I wasn’t going to make it and I ended up with around 250.
I was running dipoles for each band except for the 10m ground plane, but when I realised conditions weren’t great I flicked the amp on as well.
I went unassisted just for fun but it probably meant I left a few Qs on the table. I am constantly amazed at the scores some manage to rack up.
A comment about operating times: you are unlikely to find anyone on down here between 2200z and around 0500z as frankly there isn’t enough activity and often no propagation.
My score:
Band QSOs Pts Cty Sec Pt/Q
3.5 20 340 9 3 17.0
7 74 1125 32 7 15.2
14 101 1385 35 9 13.7
21 46 710 17 5 15.4
28 10 250 10 0 25.0
Total 251 3810 103 24 15.2
Score: 3,810
1 Mult = 2.0 Q’s
73
Mark ZL3AB