California QSO Party time!!!!

Well, I did not have the use of the tri-bander for this contest. My only goal was to beat the 58 QSO's that I had in last year's contest. I was all set and ready to go on Saturday morning. I had the software loaded and working properly. The contest started and I was loving the fact that I was hearing a bunch of stations on 15 meters. Then it went all downhill from there. My computer started doing wierd things. My keyboard seemed to lock up. It was not wanting to work properly. The tab key would work, but everytime I hit the "6" key, the program would minimize and would not let me type anything more. I swapped out keyboards and that did not work either. I fiddled with it for a while and lost a number of potential QSO's because of the problem. Then, after it seemed to clear up, Allyson told me that the phone was for me. The contest was only an hour old and my boss was calling telling me that I needed to come into work because of the severe weather we were having. People were being evacuated from their homes and the phones were ringing off the hook in dispatch. So, I went into work. Almost 6 hours later, I returned to the contest. Conditions had changed and 20 was the band for action. I worked 20 as long as I could. When I switched to 40, there was no one there. So, I was prepared to call it quits about 9pm. I spent some time with Allyson and then went to look at my logs from last year. I noticed that 40 did not heat up until later, so I went back to check. There was some action there and was able to work a number of stations before the foreign broadcasters took over the band. I did not hear anything on 80, so I called it a night. After church on Sunday, things were hopping on 20 and 15 again, so I worked all I could until I finally had to take a nap. I was pleased that I almost doubled my score and number of QSO's this year. I worked all but 12 of the 58 counties this year, so I can say that I was pleased with the result, even though I had lost the use of the tribander. This is what the final stats looked like:

Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs
--------------------
160: 0 0
80: 0 0
40: 0 11
20: 0 75
15: 0 29
10: 0 0
6: 0 0
2: 0 00
--------------------
Total: 0 115 Mults = 45 Total Score = 10,350

I am happy with this, even though it won't be enough to win one of the bottles of wine in the contest!!! But, it does give me a goal to strive to beat next year.

WAE DX contest

Well, I was finally able to get out my Worked All Europe DX contest logs. I had problems with the logging software I used and decided to re-input the few contacts I made into another program that would number everything correctly. I learned my lesson there.

Here is what the final results looked like for me......

Summary:
Band QSOs QTCs Mults
-------------------------
80: 0 0 0
40: 3 0 3
20: 24 0 14
15: 0 0 0
10: 0 0 0
-------------------------
Total: 27 0 17 Total Score = 875

Tragedy

Well, it wasn't a hurricane or a even a tropical storm. But we had a nor'easter come through here this weekend. Winds were gusting up to 60 mph. When I came home on Friday the 6th, I found this waiting for me. Allyson said that she saw it coming over and it was a slow fall, fortunately. I did go out in the rain on Saturday and remove the tribander and rotor from the mast. There is some damage on the reflector end because it crimped a little bit of the mast when the weight of the antenna was pressed against the side of the mast. It does look to be repairable. Unfortunately, I was looking forward to using the tribander in the California QSO Party, but it was not meant to be. But, I am going to do my best to have it up in some form for the CQ WW DX contest at the end of the month. This antenna project has definitely been a big one, but I am hoping that I will be able to afford a tower soon so that we will not have to worry about these types of problems anymore.