11/17/2004 | N3BB Man oh man-what work! It's like water torture trying to find someone you have not worked toward the end!

I didn't want to prolong the agony so kept at it and ended the agony at 0150
with my final one hour and 10 minutes required off-time. 30 hours has rarely
felt so long a period of time!

This one will be my best, however, I suppose. 40 and 15 were the QSO bands,
with 20 about half those numbers. 10 Meters was a "sucker band" as it sounded
so good with some real pounder-inners, but was too "thin" in terms of footprint.
80 was open too but not many casuals were there. It seems there always are
some new guys in there. Looking at the band totals, I suppose I worked a lot
stations on 80 after all, but didn't seem like it at the time.

We had company Saturday AM before the contest as Tom, W0GG, and Nancy stopped by
here to visit from Colorado as they were in San Antonio for a conference. It
was great seeing Tom and Nancy, very good friends for over twenty five years,
but it meant I raced to the station just before the contest started. I missed
the news reports that a mass of charged particles was on the way, and had I
known that, I might have taken off when things got slow Sunday AM. But like
N2IC stated, I also slogged on. Looking at the hourly rates of 45-24-31 for the
first three full hours after getting on Sunday AM, I probably made a mistake.
But heck, that was OK compared to the Sunday afternoon and evening BLAHS!

Speaking of dying, my Alpha 87A died Sunday. Well, it didn't die. That fan
which had started making noise died, so you can't operate w/out a cooling fan.
It was like a 747 in terms of noise and shrieking. So I hunkered down with one
amp (Alpha 76PA) on the run station and did all my Sunday S&Ping with 100W.
Hardly even noticed the difference except for some backscatter stuff. Other
than that, the gear all worked OK, and TR 6.78 was flawless for me. I finally
feel really comfortable with it. For CW SO2R there is no better.

I tried to make 1300 QSOs, and had it teed up with 1299 with five minutes left
for me to operate. A W6 called but was a dupe, and no one else. Darn! So I
missed the elusive 1300. Oh well. This really is a hard contest!
Note, I ended up with 1295 valid QSOs after removing three dupes and one mangled QSO where I got all flummoxed with TR and deleted the call sign of a K8. Sorry about that! -- N3BB