I agree with KE5ZRT, the band conditions weren’t the best today.　 After an hour or two of butting my head, I ran some errands and got back about 45 minutes before the event was over.　 I only made 12 contacts, six in the last 45 minutes or so.

A comment I want to offer the Rookies, most that I heard were not using phonetics. That makes a big difference for us old geezers that have hearing problems. It is not a case of one’s personal volume control being turned down, but rather the audio spectrum having places that are significantly attenuated while other parts of that spectrum are fine. When someone gives a call like KK3MGE without using phonetics, some of us old timers have trouble figuring out what it was.

Our of my 12 QSOs, I worked 8 states, MO, ID, MN, CA, LA, MA, AZ, TX.　 I learned that two of the CA stations were using Stanford Universities club station, W6YX, one was operating on 14.305 MHz (K6YL) and the other on 14.257 MHz (KJ6ELO).　 They must have had some really good filtering.

Finally I want to say that I hope all of you Rookies had fun, even if the propagation could have been better. My guess is all of you did.

73,