03/14/2004 | TI8M WOW - Great Contest! The ARRL DX 'test continues to be a good contest for our group to operate from Costa Rica. The M/2 category certainly is the most competitive in this contest but luckily our group does this for the fun, not for final placement.

Our TI8M crew added several new ops this year, including TI2MOT and continued to increase our fun and Q's. It's really great to operate with two local hams, TI2MOT and our old friend, TI2KAC, both avid contestors. We remain committed to having fun and increasing our "fun factor" with each contest while making appropriate dents in the local seafood population.

We spent an extra 1/2 day getting the 160m sloper up in it's usual position and it proved worthy with 209 Q / 43 M. The low bands are certainly playing a bigger part in our results than previously. I heard one comment about our weak signal on 160m but I stand by my reply that "We put our sloper in the tallest tree around and just can't do much better!". At least 209 folks heard us.

We had excellent openings on 10m with 1410 Q / 53 M for a pleasant surprise. Evidently 10m was not as good in the states so a big "Thanks!" for all who worked us, especially the last few 10m mults we snagged, ID, MT, WY & NV, though we never could find UT or ND on 10m.

We certainly have some ideas for our next effort with a Beverage at the top of our list of "Gotta Have's". It's still alot of fun to do this with only two yagi's hanging in trees and wire slopers for 40m/80m/160m. We used WriteLog for the second time and utilized it's features a bit more with a few more options yet to implement.

QSL Via TI2KAC - info on QRZ.com. Look for us in Oct in CQWW.

Bob - TI8/W4BD -- W4BD