12/13/2004 | N4KZ After being disinterested in contesting for many years, I finally succumbed to its allure recently. My 10m contest effort was again what I call "very casual." I spent 8 hours working low power mixed mode and made a little over 200 QSOs. I enjoyed the operating experience but don't expect to win awards -- and probably won't since I am not able or willing to put the time in the chair, as they say. Still, contesting is growing on me and I really like the contest logging software which makes logging and sending the results in so much easier. Conditions were better than I thought they might be. I actually put together one 60-QSO run in an hour early Sunday afternoon on SSB. Lots of W6 and a few W7 stations during that hour. I took one of my frequent breaks and when I returned, wow, what happened to the W6 propagation? It went south -- literally. But then I managed to put some Pacific Q's in the log for a few extra multipliers before going QRT as the band faded about 2300 UTC. I just don't know how guys spend an entire weekend doing this because family obligations always seem to come up. -- 73, Dave, N4KZ, Frankfort, KY -- N4KZ