Alan,

My pleasure to run VK5WIA again, although I am almost sorry at how many non VK stations I did work. There were quite a few I managed to clean sweep and actually QSY/band hop to work them across all of the bands from 40-10m with. Still, if we were to favour just VK/ZL then I am sure that isn’t in the spirit of the contest either.

If anything, we need a system where the VK teams stations come looking for the HQ stations on the hour perhaps. My beam perhaps wasnt always pointing the best way for the east coast when I was working 15m/10m to G land but knowing to look for VK at a given time might help get things better set up to be heard? Even so, I also often found this year that the VK stations were inaudible here in VK5 as we were in the skip zone. Really poor signals were heard from VK2/3/4 and I rarely heard VK7 anywhere. There was also lots of echo and other horribleness on the signals caused by combined LP/SP/multiple loops around the planet effects that made weak sig CW very hard to copy for me. The Canadians at one point sounded like they were being drowned in auroral flutter too.

There are also some big hitting countries that we never hear. To date I have never worked ZS on CW from here on any band. The 9Ms, 9Vs, V8s were also conspicuous by their absence at this QTH.  A distinct lack of ZLs (until the last few hours) was also noted here. I also didnt hear any 5W, C2, 9Y, V2, V5, VP5, VP2 or 4S stations. I know there are stations in those places, but perhaps some effort needs to be done to reach out to more of them, particularly in the Asia/Pacific to get them enthused to get active for the weekend.

FWIW things to consider next year.

Finally,  I will also endeavour to have an 80m antenna back in the air next year so I can work more VKs of an evening.

Regards,

Grant  VK5GR / aka VK5WIA