[NLRS] N9DG June contest report

[Duane - N9DG via NLRS]

Another June contest in the log and submitted. One of the highlights was some decent tropo on 144-432 Saturday evening, and it was still in there somewhat on Sunday morning. I got the sense though that I was on the Western fringes of it here on West side of EN53. It seemed like I mostly worked mid-Atlantic region big guns, and a couple well located rovers, I didn't get the sense that any of the stations that I worked were in more modest locations, or more modestly equipped. And also while the tropo got pretty strong signal strength wise to those bigger guns at times, it never got into the greater than S9 territory either.

6M Es wise I got into some of it to the SW in the evening on Saturday, and bunch more to the SE and gulf coast, TX/OK region midday Sunday. Never really opened to the Northeast/New England from here.

Rovers, what can I say.. I had three 4-band rovers come to my local grid corner by Dodgeville this time around, they certainly boosted the Q counts by quite a bit. I was able to pick up some rover Qs in the Chicago area, though not quite as many, or on as many bands as I would typically do to that area. A big thanks to all of them..

The fixed station activity levels seemed a bit down in the Milwaukee/Chicago areas, although conditions seemed rather flat “locally”. That may have accounted for some of that. Also despite some mid Atlantic tropo, it didn't seem like there was much enhancement for any of the normal day to day 100-200 mile stuff I worked.

Didn't do as well to my NW directions either. I suspect a big piece of that was because of the showers and T-storms in that area on Saturday and how that tends to mess things up propagation wise. And I didn't get my antennas out that way quite as much as I normally would have due to chasing the higher band tropo, and the 6M Es in other directions.

The equipment all performed great, no problems of note with any of it. And I had pretty much trashed my voice by early Saturday evening, this despite my CQs being mostly done via voicekeyer. I know I was yelling into the mic when I really didn't need to, so I'm sure that is what trashed my voice sooner than it would have been otherwise. Good thing the TX audio chain has a peak limiter built-in, and that it was doing its job (I hope) to keep me from over-driving the TX audio on the bands.

The TX count numbers (now includes counts for 222/432):
50 MHz TX count ~1060
144 MHz TX count ~1440
222 MHz TX count ~220
432 MHz TX count ~300

For total of ~3020 TX key-ups across all bands. I was on operating for somewhere around 25 hrs of time for the contest. That comes out to about 2 transmissions per minute somewhere across the 4 bands for the entire time that I was on operating.

Q x Grids
50 137 x 65
144 97 x 37
222 45 x 24
432 58 x 25

Claimed score around 66K SOLP.

I'm once again really quite pleased how 222 has kept pretty good pace with 432. I still think getting on 222 is well worth the effort..

Duane
N9DG