Don’t want to talk too loud but everything was working and stayed working this time. Didn’t even have to climb before or during the contest. Scary, but I’m sure I’ll pay for that before the next contest.  902/3 checks out fine and I really think the band has just gotten a noisier over the past few years making it really hard to pick out the weak stuff in some directions.  Apparently 902 used to be a lot cleaner, but now is often noisier than 903.    

Unfortunately an all too familiar set of conditions for a VHF contest, with flat propagation and a low turnout.   After the initial flurry the pace slowed way down. Like the UHF contest 222 and 432 totals were about equal.  Not sure if it was due to the low activity level or because 432 was way down from typical.   Probably a little bit of both. I also suspect that as we get older we tend to let the less used bands go to seed. The higher bands were typical fall flat normal but there seemed to be a bit more activity on 902/3 and 1296 than there has been. Except for a brief low intensity Aurora on 6 and 2 there was little in the way of enhancement on Saturday except for an hour or so when it stretched out all the way to EM91. 6M was a vast wasteland of broken 4 and 5 land dreams. Conditions like that make for some very long and slow hours in the seat.   What did we do before voice keyers?  

Au is fun but a real time waster during a contest. Everyone turns north but most stations with low power and average antennas can’t take really advantage of it. The rovers and the portables get lost in the shuffle. During most Au events 95% of the stations I hear are the ones I can already reach on normal tropo. Difference is they never want to turn around and run the other bands until the Au is over. So you have to find them all over again later on the same bands that you worked them on Au. You actually wind up working a lot harder for the same result.  

I keep getting fewer and fewer request for WSJT skeds. Too bad, it’s a great way to add multipliers during the overnight dead time. The ones I did get all went fast since the Sept contest is always the best one for rox. Two bands skeds can easily be accomplished in 15 minute time slots.  Randoms CQs were fewer again this year, but then again so were the multi ops.  

I find some of the multis off freq by several hundred Hz on WSJT and with clocks many seconds off sych. And there is just nothing like a loud station consistently Txing on the wrong sequence to mix things up. When locals have to TX on the same sequence that the other far off stations are TXing CQ, they QRM the CQs that other locals are trying to listen for! HSMS operation protocol is NOT exactly rocket science, but there is some thinking involved. The Westernmost TX first convention was set up for a reason, however once you get an answer on a sequence, stick with it!  Another multi was changing sequences after the QSO had already gotten started. Can’t get much done if you both TX at the same time. Yet another tries to confuse you by repeating the same thing you just sent them instead of sending you the next message like they are supposed to.  Repeating doesn’t add any value, it just makes the QSO take twice as long.  

With 200W and good antennas its easy for me to call or answer a CQ on WSJT, then get a station to QSY to 2M from 6M. With high power and good antennas its even easier. 6M rox are so long and frequent that you can easily get across a simple instruction or request.  I usually see several long bursts from the multis every sequence.  If I know the other station's go-to 2M freq I will just send -QSY 2M- instead of 73. If I don’t, I will propose a frequency, -QSY 144.111- or such. One multi didn’t respond to my request to QSY to 2M even though I know they were running WSJT on 2M. This wastes both our time as I resend the QSY request for several minutes while puzzling over what a repeated almost  full sequence 73 tone means. If you can’t go to 2M for some reason then send a simple -NO 2M-, -2M BUSY-, -SKED NOW- or even -NOT NOW- will do!    Heck you could even set up a later sked in an off time with a simple -144.122 0715Z-.  

Sunday dawned foggy and I had a lot of hope for a little tropo on the high bands. I was not disappointed and the morning QSOs were great except to the best direction … east. Worked K2YAZ in EM74 up to 3456 all on SSB with huge signals.   However hardly anybody got on much before 9AM and by that time the morning lift was dissipating.   As the sun rose higher the bands got flatter. At noon it was like a switch turned off. You think that the opening day of pro football season and the Bears game had anything to do with that?  Nah.   

The rover crowd was a little thin but the ones that did get out were very active. Worked several of them in more than one grid, and a few in a lot of grids.   W9SNR/R finds lot of good places that we can consistently sweep 8 bands. It was a lot of fun following K9JK/R around to multiple grids on Sunday, but too bad they were having difficulty with 432 or a lot more Qs and grids would have gone in the log.  It was also great to see the return of K0DAS/R after a long hiatus.  W9SZ was hilltop portable as usual and workable on all 8 bands. The evening brought some long shots to the SW and put a lot of good grids in the log on the bottom 4.  Some Qs were well over 400 miles. High point of the contest was working WQ0P hilltop portable in EM19 on 6M through 1296 even though the noise on 902/903 was horrendous.  

73 de Bob2