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2012 ARRL June VHF Contest

06/14/2012 | K1WHS

This was a very laid back event for me. At least it started out that way. Equipment troubles made operating the higher bands a problem, so the few friends who showed up for the weekend had no trouble deciding on being a Limited Multi Operator station. We stuck to 50 through 432 MHz. My plan was to hang out in the nice weather, smoke a few cigars, make a few contacts, and get a good night's sleep. The weather was fantastic. Ernie, W1MRQ, was just back from a year in Afghanistan, and wanted to operate a little 144 MHz. Steve, N1JFU drove up from Massachusetts and convinced his buddy, KM3T, Dave, to come along and see what it was like to operate a VHF contest from Maine. Dave, KM3T spent most of Saturday afternoon alternating between 50 MHz, 144 MHz, and the picnic table, where we held many spirited discussions at the expense of "chair time" on 222 and 432 MHz. As I said this was a low key effort! We didn't let operating get in the way of all our story telling! Art, K1BX, decided at the last minute to come on Saturday. He likes to operate 50 MHz, and lost no time making contacts. We got going a little late, but the first QSO was with Puerto Rico, followed by Cuba a few minutes later.  We piled up grids on 50 MHz pretty steadily. We quit for the evening just before 11 PM local time. The plan was to get up and be QRV at 6 AM. That was a good move as we started working Europe shortly afterward. From 10:30-12:00 UT we worked a few EA, CT, F, and EA7 stations.Sunday morning was pretty good, with reasonable activity, but no huge piles of stations to work. Around lunch time, we saw our only real bad stretch with very little interesting 50 MHz propagation evident. Ernie and Art were discusing whether to leave early and go homeat about 4:30PM local time, whenArt received a call (off the back of the beam) from EA1XT in Spain. Art turned the top antenna around, and started working more Europeans. He then turned all four yagis toward Europe and was greeted by a rather serious CW pileup that lasted for hours. He finally turned the all the antennas back stateside at about 2300 UT as there was intense propagation to the West coast as well as single hop propagation to the midwest, while the Europeans were dropping out. Art was glad he did not go home early. The grids on six were now well up in the 200's with more going into the log by the minute! I started getting excited and reasoned that the MUF might approach 144 MHz, so I started calling many CQs on 144. It wasn't long before some New York and New England stations started working E skip out west. I heard nothing here for a long time, then at 0152 UT I started working some sporadic E contacts with South Dakota and Iowa on 144. W7XU, WB0TEM, WB0YWW and others were worked, but signals were not all that loud as E skip can sometimes be. I was not complaining however, as I nabbed five more grids. The 50 MHz band was open until the contest ended. On 144, W7XU in South Dakota faded out finally at 0244 UT, and the last 15 minutes of the contest was back to working the locals. Sunday afternoon and evening was about as exciting as it gets. The good propagation allowed us to amass fantastic totals on six meters. We ended up with over 1350 QSOs in 305 grids on six alone! 144, 222, and 432 were pretty good considering how little time we actually spent trying to work people! Final score is somewhere around 750 K points. "Wow" is all I can say.

-- K1WHS


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