[NLRS] UHF Contest (long summary of a short contest for me!)

[John P. Toscano]

My plans didn't work out at all.  We had relatives visiting from out of 
town, and my wife went and made all sorts of plans for the whole family 
without even consulting me first, even though I had told her a few times 
of my plans for the weekend contest.  By the time I found out about her 
new plans, it was too late for me to make a change to them.  :(

All I managed was about a half-hour at the end of the contest.  I was 
able to complete on 222, 432, 902, and 1296 with KM0T, W0ZQ, and WB0LJC; 
I caught the family rover pair W0IS & KC0OIA on 432 SSB and 223 FM only 
(to their hand-held rubber duck antennas, no less!); reached W0GHZ on 
1296 only; and W0AMT/R on 222 only.  Barely squeezed out the last 
contact with W0AMT before the clock struck 1 PM (CDT) and the contest 
was over.  I didn't bother to keep a log, but I guess in retrospect I 
should have!  Oh well, since I've been too busy to deal with the sick 
hard drive in the computer that would have been used for logging, and I 
only had 30 minutes to operate, even setting up the laptop would have 
burned up more time than it would been worth.  I should have just 
grabbed a pencil and paper.  As they say, hindsight is always 20-20.

Gary ('LJC), sorry I was such a klutz in trying to switch to 902 FM, 
that IF rig just confuses the heck out of me because it is so different 
from the radios I use "all the time".  Short-term solution, I should 
practice using it more.  Long-term solution, I will get the new IF 
switch built so I can use the familiar IC-706 instead, and get 2304 on 
the air as a bonus.  :)

Gary ('GHZ), sorry I didn't make my acknowledgement clear enough, so you 
didn't immediately know we were finished and I was calling Gary ('LJC) 
next.  I'd have been happy to give you the other 3 bands afterwards, but 
I couldn't get your attention in time after I finished with 'LJC.  Then 
I heard W0AMT on 222 and decided to at least try to keep my pre-contest 
promise to work them, so I jumped bands barely in time to make only the 
single QSO with them.

My observation on band conditions is limited to a statistically 
insignificantly tiny portion of the 24 hours of the contest (barely 2%), 
but there seemed to be a lot of QSB on most folks, especially on KM0T's 
signals and W0AMT's signal.  I was afraid I wouldn't be able to work 
Mike on 902/1296, since he was a little hard for me to hear on 222/432 
(unusual for me), but we made it OK (once I found the right frequency -- 
the dang transverters didn't even have time to warm up, so they kept on 
drifting during the QSO, and I ended up about 5-6 Kc away from where I 
*thought* I was tuned!)  And I was expecting to have some difficulty 
working 'LJC, based on the June contest, but once I eliminated the 
operator error on my end, his signals were extremely solid to me this 
time around!

Thanks for giving me the 30 minutes of fun!  I'd say that I'm looking 
forward to September, but summers around here are so short that I 
consider that a bit of a sacrilege!  I guess I should have stayed in San 
Antonio more than just the 3 years I lived there, where summers seemed 
to last into October.  But then I might never have met you guys, and 
that would have been my loss!

73 de W0JT.

P.S., don't look for me as a rover anytime soon.  As I already spilled 
the beans to KC0LBT, I might as well admit to the rest of you that my 
1991 GMC Safari AWD rovermobile van is now history, and my new ride is 
going to need a lot of work to become a capable rover vehicle.

John