[AK-VHF] K7CW in June Test

[Paul Kiesel]

I pretty much put a full effort into this one and got off to a great start. At the end of the first two hours, I had worked 195 stations! Things slowed down after that except for a couple of short, but decent openings to the Northeast. I had to work hard to make contacts throughout the rest of the contest. One contact at a time and lots of space between contacts. 


Happily, W4s would pop up often, along with W5s and W0s. I was surprised at the paucity of W6s. I'm sure there was a lot of action down there, but I sure didn't hear much of it. I got the impression that a lot of the country had a wide-open band for most daylight hours and that we in the Puget Sound Lowland barely missed out on it due to the locations of the sporadic-E clouds being just beyond where we could benefit from them. 


Once again, the spectrum between 50.080 and 50.100 filled up with CW action during the openings. When the band was open to the Northeast, it was possible to work a lot of stations on CW, as the signal levels were high enough to copy many low-power stations. It's obvious that 20 kilohertz of spectrum is hugely inadequate during major propagation events. Also, nearby beacons kill one's receiver when the noise blanker is turned on. This happened to me during the contest. There is one "/6" beacon in CN87 that is particularly bad. I wish there were an easy way to shift the beacon allocation downward farther in frequency (and not have loud beacons near cities). 

I've been working on achieving the FFMA, so working new grids was on my agenda during the contest. I did manage to work two new ones, DM83 and EL79. I was glad to get them, as finding new grids is very difficult with less than 30 to go. Every needed grid is very rare now. Speaking of rare grids, those who worked member KB7ME got a rare one in CN71 and those who worked W6XM got really rare CM93. I think K7VK was on the DN24/25 line, also. I did not work any DX stations. I also did not work KL7. As Contest Chairman for the Alaska VHF-Up Group, I was watching for an opportunity. I noted that there were at least three stations active from CN78; WB7UZO, VE7DXG/R and N7EPD/R. I also heard N7EPD/R and K7MDL/R in CN77, another rare grid. Many of us in the PNW have these grids confirmed, but they are still quite rare outside of our area. I was glad to see the interest in activating those grids. Also, though he was not able to find a suitable location to operate
 from, KI7JA tried to activate DN04. Bruce spent a lot of time and gas money in that attempt. He gets credit, too.


From what I've seen on the Internet, there must be quite a number of stations who have worked more than 1,000 QSOs. This June contest was the best I've ever experienced, despite the fact that we got left out of some of the action. I'm really looking forward to the CQ WW VHF Contest next month.

I worked single-band, high-power, 50 MHz. After fixing all the typos and weeding out remaining nasties, I ended up with 628 QSOs in 199 grids for a final claimed score of 124,972 points.  Thanks to all who contacted me.


73,
Paul, K7CW