01/05/2009 | KB1CJ It's a good thing I don't take my contesting seriously. Antenna Rotor froze due west, but my 20+ year old mini-beam has so little directivity on 20M it hardly mattered. On the other hand, it always helps to read the rules! I saw Jan. 3, and jumped the gun at 0000Z. What was funny was that many other stations appeared to make the same mistake. Fortunately, I only had to clean out a couple of hours of contacts from the log. Live and learn.

Had fun using a new software configuration (N1MM with the recent release of MMTY), and getting to know my new IC-7000's DSP filtering capabilities in very heavy QRM -- worked quite well. Unfortunately, almost no DX on when I was active. Despite that, I was glad to see many U.S. stations having fun with RTTY contesting. By the way, 15 meters was open - too bad more stations weren't taking advantage of it. -- KB1CJ