07/13/2009 | N1YWB I entered SO Phone QRP; always a brave decision. My contest station was quite modest, a K2 with an 80m dipole up about 40'. I awoke on the morning of to discover my dopole had blown down in the night. I scrambled and got it back up a few feet higher than before (am I the only one who uses a shore-casting rod with a 4oz sinker to hang dipoles?) and got on the air literally 1 minute before the start.

Band conditions were mostly awful. Most signals were extremely weak the whole time. I started on 20 and it was fair. I made some good contacts on 15m while it was open. In the evening 20m became fairly good. When it shut down I switched to 40m which was ok but dropped off to poor by the end. I only made one contact on 80m; it never opened for me; very high QRN. I made one QSO on 10m and I heard a few other stations in there but it never really opened. At 4 hours left in the contest my rate dropped to 4 and I started falling asleep at the dial; that's when I pulled the plug and went to bed. The funny thing was that I could still hear a few strong stations; I suspect perhaps the bands were open but I wasn't the only one who threw in the towel early. Overall 20 was my workhorse band with 15 and 40 both taking some share.

I also lost about 5 hours due to thunderstorms.

I think I did pretty well, all things considered. 135 QSOs and 53 mults for a claimed score of 16,059; Not bad for 5 watts into a dipole. Persistence and skill really do play a powerful role in contest performance. Somebody with big-gun antennas could probably clean up in this category, because there are so few serious entries. -- N1YWB