[NLRS] Sept 2004 was for the dogs – as in “Rovers”

[Duane Grotophorst]

The big story this time around was all the rover
activity that came close enough by to really boost my
score. Looking at the log data more than 1/3 of my Q’s
were rovers, - wow. If it wasn’t for all those rovers
out there my score would have been down despite decent
normal conditions.

Overall the activity was down for the <200 mile range
fixed stations, the Chicago area was rather quiet,
especially considering the size of the population
that’s there. I would say that the band conditions on
144-432 were back to the normal average for the most
part. This was a nice change from other recent
contests where the conditions seemed to be well below
normal. For once I was able to pretty consistently
work those rovers out to some decent distances unlike
some previous contests where rovers became largely
unworkable beyond about 150 miles. This time around
200+ mile Q’s with many of the rovers were generally
possible.

On Saturday evening it was a bit of a challenge to
keep the flow going with 4 sets of rovers all hitting
new grids at about the same time. I was juggling beam
headings and frequencies while doing Q run’s with
K0DAS/R (almost in my back yard at the time), (N0DQS/R
well into the EN2x’s), K0PG/K9ILT/R (in the EN3x’s),
and W9FZ/R (in EN44). Kind of a different problem to
have in VHF+ contesting where the average Q rate is
usually rather low.

Conditions were normal enough to work more of the NLRS
gang that always seemed to be extra hard or not
possible to work for the last few contests. Also there
did seem to be a general favoring of the propagation
to the west from here; I was able to fill the
EN2x/EN3x columns pretty well. To the south the EN5x
column has some pretty big holes in it for grids that
I normally work, same for the north. The EN6x/7x
columns were hard to fill and do have some gaps for
grids on some bands that should have been easy to
fill. I think that was partially do to lower fixed
station activity. The EN8x column was down a bit too.

And finally a most welcomed surprise during the last
45 minutes of the contest, - tropo. There was a nice
opening into FM19 and FN00 on 144-432 starting around
0215UTC. Oddly though I only heard and worked 2
stations out that way. Where were all the others? I
wonder if it had something to do with the geometry of
the duct where only the high elevation stations were
getting into the duct from that end. I never got a
good sense of how many folks found them on this end
either, it sure seemed like those PA multiops were
calling CQ a lot with no takers, again I wonder if it
was the geometry? They were on 2200-2500 ft mountains
and I’m at 1400 here, which is one of the higher areas
in this part of the country. 

The numbers:
         QSOs    PTS   MULTS
50 MHz    57      57    21
144 MHz  125     125    39
222 MHz   64     128    30
432 MHz   75     150    31
TOTAL    321     460   121

Total claimed score 55660 SOLP

A new all time high for mults on 222 and 432, I’m
thinking Q’s too. All in all I’m quite pleased
considering that there was no 6M openings of any kind
that I got into.

N9DG
EN53bj

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