This one had it all Au, Es and even some enhanced tropo. Back in December one of my 902/3 antennas fell down due to a cyclic stressed mast bracket, and while the parts needed to fix it arrived a few days before the contest the weather was too bad to even consider replacing it. Luckily the weekend before was really mild for January so I re-cabled for one antenna and it worked OK. Also had to re-cable for one 6M antenna. The bottom 6M2.5WL was open, probably due to a setscrew vibrated loose in the driven element.  The 6M antennas vibrate a lot in a light breeze.  The DE is way too far out to reach so it will have to come down in the spring to be repaired. At least it’s the easier of the two to deal with and removing it will make getting the 902 up a bit easier too. I had the other 6M antennas all disconnected from testing it, so when the Es started I had to scramble to get them all working again during the contest since openings like we had for this contest tend to work better with lower antennas.  

  Saturday morning was busy with making arrangements to fly to NY Monday due to the not unexpected death of N2KMA’s mother that occurred late Friday night. When the contest started I was already tired and distracted so probably didn’t take as much advantage of the conditions as I could have.  N2KMA insisted that I keep out of her way as she made the endless phone calls, but I took a lot of time off to do the normal household stuff for us and the dogs while she was doing that. I’m thankful for even being able to work this one at all under the circumstances, and it was good in that it kept my mind off things too.      

It was fun to work Es in January, but since it was mostly open to TX and FL big rates never really materialized.  Worked a lot of multipliers so it made it worthwhile to stay on 6 most of Saturday, but I knew that I couldn’t neglect the other bands. So whenever the opportunity arose I’d QSY for a band run. I had made a lot of WSJT skeds so that helped the mults out too. Good thing I did, I didn’t hear a lot of CQs for random Qs at all, and only captured one station even when I left it on to get a couple hours sleep.  

I didn’t get into much Es on Sunday at all, and the few stations I heard were the loud ones I’d worked the day before. Sunday was so quiet here locally that I found myself nodding off in the chair several times. We did have a very nice Au Sunday evening and I was able to work several stations on 6M ssb then QSY them to 2M cw.   All in all it was a good one that I would have enjoyed a lot more under different circumstances.

73 de Bob2