This was a busy radio weekend. First, the N4EME crew set up in rare grid FN57 in Northern Maine. I tried with them on FT8 on Friday night but wasn't successful. The next morning I got on the chat server and saw they were working folk on 6m meteor-scatter, MSK144 on 50.260. I don't have a lot of meteor scatter experience, but I gave it a shot an was decoding them on pretty regular pings. I was able to quickly work them and then focus on getting ready for the ARRL June VHF contest.
The June Contest is usually dominated by 6m activity, and now with FT8, that can make it somewhat boring. I love operating 6m FT8, but it's not super fun during a contest. I find there are soo many people on that I have a hard time completing contacts. So, off we went and of course, we ended up having a massive opening to the Caribbean, which normally is great, but a lot of times the DX stations aren't running in contest mode, so you have to either switch WSJT-X out of contest mode or run JTDX at the same time (Which is what I did). In the end I worked number of the DX stations, including:
TO11A - Guadalupe
PJ2BR - Curacao
VP9NM - Bermuda
HK3O - Colombia
PJ4NX - Bonaire
HK3W - Colombia
9Y4D - Trinidad and Tobago
8P2K - Barbados
J79WTA - Dominica
PV8DX - Brazil
NP3YL - Puerto Rico
I had recently been complaining that we hadn't had much activity in the Caribbean this season, but this list seems to say otherwise.
The big DX news for the weekend happened further to the north. I was able to work Bo, OX3LX, who is operating in Greenland. Bo has been there since the previous Tuesday, but I hadn't been able to hear him at all. We finally got the opening during the contest and I was able to grab him before he had a big pileup.
After that the other DX was Western Sahara in Africa, S01WS. I've been seeing other folks work him on and off for a while, and I've occasionally had a few decodes from him, but again, was finally able to work him. I had a busted QSO earlier in the week, this times I was able to confirm it.
The contest was a low priority effort for me. My main goal was to get my voice capabilities working again for 6m, which I was successful at doing. Calling CQ on 6m SSB was a lot more fun than operating FT8, and it produced a number of contacts, faster than digital.
The end result was about 14k points
50 FT4 17 17 8 1.0
50 FT8 47 47 36 1.0
50 USB 54 54 31 1.0
144 FT8 20 20 9 1.0
144 USB 5 5 3 1.0
420 USB 7 14 6 2.0
Total Both 150 157 93 1.0
Score: 14,601
No comments:
Post a Comment