09/14/2004 | K2QO/R WOW, great conditons here in the WNY area. My rover had a fine substitute rover partner in K2ZR, a rabid CW operator who really dug out the weak ones. We only operated on Sunday, had few bands than last year, and still blew away my previous best score by a ton!

The score will be 26,433 POINTS

Band- Q's/Mults

6M- 52/21, 2M- 98/24, 222- 27/15, 432- 32/17 and 1296- 9/5

We operated from 7 GRIDS: EN91 EN92 FN01 FN02 FN03 FN12 AND FN13 driving about 530 miles.

Some of the big WNY staions were either totally absent like W2FU, or put in a short single band effort like K2AXX who had all his stuff down for reconstruciton. Also missing were W2ONP, N2JMH and N2OPW who have previously padded the K2QO logs. I can only imagine the Q total had there been a full contingent of station on here in WNY.

The equipment in the K2QO/R is strictly a minimalist/survival set of gear. 6, 2 and 432 are right out of an FT-100, 222 and 1296 use an FT817 as an IF with a W1GHZ HB XVTR on 222 and a DEMI XVTR on 1296. The only band with any "real" power was 2M with 160W thanks to an amplifier loan by K2TER/R (TNX BILL!)

Best "DX" was EN92 to FN44 on 222 with a lowly 5W and a HB 6-el beam placed at the BOTTOM of the antenna stack. That is 500+ miles! Very cool.

So that's it from here in WNY, see y'all in January for the Sweepstakes! Time to turn in the log and begin planning....

73, Mark -- K2QO