I love DX contests, but Sweepstakes is just so much fun!

We bought a house in NNY two years ago (we line in ENY) that we're going to move into full time when our youngest goes off to college next year. I've been building a station there and do all my contesting from there.  For Sweepstakes it has the added benefit of being in a rare section that historically takes only around 35,000 points to win one of the single op high power categories.

This year I couldn't work 24 hours of the contest even without sleep as I had to leave for my sons football banquet by 2PM on Sunday.  I had high hopes for some decent nightime operating though, as I had put up an NVIS 80m dipole (highest point - 18 feet!).  The Butternut vertical just didn't cut it for this contest with the very narrow bandwidth and low takeoff angle.

Last year I had missed a clean sweep by 6 sections - MS, NT and SD were difficult without using a spotter, but I had failed to work close in sections NLI, ME and EMA due to the inappropriate antenna.

I started out on 15m operating S&P.  Hear NT 59+, called for nearly 30 minutes, no answer. Running 1500 watts, I'm thinking what the heck.  Actually, I was thinking of a different, more colorful word if you catch my drift.  I operated S&P until I went to bed at 12:30.  I had 130+ QSOs by then and over 50 sections worked.

The next morning I resume my S&P around 9AM deciding I'd rather have a clean sweep than place first in the section. By 11:00 I'm down to 2 sections needed - MS and ME.  I ran a frequency on 40m for a while (I think that's the first time I'd been on 40m during the day since I was a novice) and picked up ME.  Switched to 20m, ran a frequency there and worked MS at 18:42 before shutting the station down at 18:56.  Picked up nearly 100 QSO's in those last couple of hours and ended up with 271 and a score or 43,330, probably earning a section first place if history is any guide.

Most annoying thing to happen was the only station I found from EMA during my S&P didn't give me my report and went back to calling CQ after taking my exchange!  When I got through to him later, he would only say that we worked already and wouldn't stop long enough to listen to me!  Fortunately I worked a couple of EMA stations later in the contest.

Al