This was my first go at mentoring a contest newbie in the Rookie Round-up.  I must say, it sure felt like Field Day with so much variety in the signals and exchanges.

The solar activity did not help matters much, we received a bulletin from NOAA #10-2 an hour before the event that we have experienced out first Solar Radiation Storm of Cycle 24, I thought to myself this is going to be interesting.  The bulletin reported the storm had subsided, but they were predicting oscillations for the next few hours.

Phil KJ6ELO rookie of '09 and I met at the W6YX club shack about 45 minutes early to make sure we had all systems up and running, things were looking real good.

I briefed Phil on the operation of the radio and the antennas, we went over setting the starting frequencies in the FT-1000MP MkV rig so when we decided to QSY, we'd land at the recommended band and starting frequency for this event.  You might say we were optimistic with 40m from the Pacific coast...  Anyhow, Phil got on the air a bit before the event to warm up his vocals, get a feel for the controls and receive signal checks from various stations worked.

The start of the contest went off without a hitch, the online logger appeared to be working correctly and we found our station out in front, then along came Mr. Murphy, locked up the online tool, we fell back to hand-logging and scrambled to bring up a stand-alone logger on the computer.  Phil took everything in stride and managed to keep his pace and composure through all of this, I'm sure he was sweating bullets for a bit, until we moved things back to the computer and he could pick up his pace again.

Our original plan was to work the high bands a bit like 15m and see about 10m if it looked promising.  Our monitoring rig and some of the packet cluster spots showed activity on 15m, but it did not seem like there were some serious openings and opportunity to have a good run.  Our plans for changing bands were put on hold as Phil was able to hold his own amongst a fair amount of  natural QRN and man-made QRM noise on the band.  The fading QSB signals didn't help much either and the stations we worked were very helpful with providing fills and repeats.  I guess since this is a Rookie event, folks were considerate with timing and pile-ups.

We took a few bio breaks during the event which allowed me to provide some feedback to Phil on his style and areas for improvement, he took in those suggestions and by the time the event was winding down he had the rough edges honed down and was getting real good at working and logging stations with a nice rhythm and timing. 

I was quite surprised at his stamina and drive to get more contacts in spite of some tough band conditions.  A decent roofing filter and a bit of adjustments to the width and shift helped to reduce adjacent station interference.  When we moved high in the band where it seemed quieter, the rate was not as good as it was lower even though we were spotted once or twice, Phil wanted back into the fray, fortunately the rig, our location and antennas helped to keep his 100w signal aloft and with a decent amount of punch at the receiving end.

Phil logged over two hundred and twenty contacts, including dupes of which about half were rookies, that's a good showing of rookie stations during this six hour event, he also logged 44 location/QTH multipliers.  We did not get any DX outside of North America, nor any stations from Mexico.  We pretty much kept the 6el 20m monoband antenna pointed due east.  We logged contacts that were running anywhere from 2.5w QRP in CO or ID to probably up to 1.5Kw across the nation.

Some comments from Phil after the event were around things like it was fun to work ladies/YL and young operators during this event because he could hear in their voices the fun they were having by getting a chance to work someone in California who was also a rookie.

Thanks for all the spots and contacts, Phil is looking forward to the next Rookie Event, now that he's been bitten by the bug at Field Day 2010 GOTA and this Round-up event.

73 de N6CCH aka Rebar and Phil KJ6ELO