06/15/2009 | K2DRH Wasnt sure for a while there would even be a serious effort in the June contest. Just went through the nuke generating plant outage from hell right after struggling with the I&C mod from hell and all my spring tower maintenance time was eaten up by problem after problem that kept me working weekends and ridiculous hours for over two months. It finally let up a week before the contest and I just barely had enough time to get it all done. Had to fix a lot of fallen ice crushed loops on the microwave antennas and a bad connector on 2M as well replace the preamp (again!).

Another one for the books, but not quite as good as 2006. Still it will be interesting to see how FL and TX did with the prolonged 6M openings to those areas. We had two big ones here in the MW, one on Saturday afternoon for about 3 hours to the NE and into FL. And another on Sunday morning for a few hours that was predominately to TX and out west. Except for frequent short duration surges, it was pretty much over by dinner on Saturday and by noon on Sunday. It would have been nice to have the NE in for a couple of hours longer, or maybe for a second wave again on Sunday. For such a huge state there's really not a lot of Texans to work! Western openings are mult rich, but the rates are a lot lower.

Quite a few rovers were out but it was hard to track them with everyone rushing off to 6M as soon as there was even a hint of prop. 2M didnt come alive until long after 6M died and the good pre-contest tropo all but disappeared. The lack of adequate time had also kept me off the air before the contest and prevented me from finding a major RF feedback problem that developed on 6M and made my TX audio sound too hot even with normal gain and compression settings. After some complaints when the signals got strong on Sunday I was able to put a bandaid on it, but never quite fix it. Of course I found the problem in some transverter interconnections right away as soon as the contest was over. My apologies if I sounded nasty or overdriven.

Highlights were working numerous Caribbean and South American countries on Saturday afternoon, working just about every Canadian province on Sunday and the sustained double hop openings to the west coast. I was trying for worked all CN87! I was amazed to hear K9AKS/QRP over 300 miles away in EN12 call me on 2M CW. It was even more amazing to complete with him on 4 bands! The most unusual thing was having N0QXW/R call me and ask for assistance. Seems Matts cell phone wasnt working and he had just come upon a herd of cattle all over the highway in DN57 Montana! I looked up the Montana Highway Patrol office for that county and reported the details he gave me. The dispatcher was a little surprised at first to hear that I was calling from Illinois, but when I told her that I was a ham in contact with another ham on the scene she understood, took the report and said they would get right on it. Thats a new contest first!
73 de Bob2 -- K2DRH EN41vr IL