[NLRS] W9FZ/R CQWW VHF report

[Bruce Richardson]

I must admit that, prior to the event, I had pretty high expectations for
the ham radio portion of the rove. 

So the only negatives for the weekend were:
1. My irrational expectations for 2M band conditions and activity levels 
2. Bit warm and muggy on Saturday 
3. Quiet 6M band conditions on Sunday 
4. A laptop charger ruined our receive on 2M for about 20 minutes on
Sunday--until we figured it out.

There were many plusses for the weekend which made it all a success:
1. Working our friends W0ZQ, W0GHZ, W0VTT, K0SIX, WA0VPJ, K0AWU, KA0PQW and
KG0VL many times from many grids.
2. First outing with FT8 for 6M.  We were feeding about 100 watts to a
dipole at 18'.  We seemed to hear better than we were heard.
3. We enjoyed the drive in the countryside in the Eyota, Altura, and St
Charles area.
4. We enjoyed the drive to a new grid corner for us near Pierz, MN (NW of
Milaca).  Speaking of this, it is a FINE grid corner that we hope to return
to.
5. Working N9TTX/R many times around the St Charles grid corner gave us
needed Qpts and mults.  We took a rover meet-up picture.
6. Working KA0RYT/R all possible Q's at the Pierz grid corner. It was great
to see Ron and the activity was fun.  
7. Weather on Sunday was very pleasant.  
8. We like that the contest ends at 4pm on Sunday.
9. Ok, so 6M was a little "open" on Saturday and that made finding anyone on
2M even tougher.

2M Activity levels were so low, we gave up on our 144.240 freq and hung out
on .200. Seemed ok on our end--I'll check with some fixed stations to see
how that worked on their end.  We were not set up for FT8 on 2M .  

With the new reality of FT8, CQ'ing on voice is gonna get fewer and fewer
responses.  Some of the alerting methods allowed in ARRL rules would have
helped us in this contest.

We are pretty happy with our score. The two rovers (N9TTX/R and KA0RYT/R)
made a HUGE difference.  Without them, our score would have been much lower.

Band	QSOs	Qpts
6m	131	130      (1 dupe)
2m	73	146
Total	204	276    140 Mults   38,640 total score

With no CSVHFS conference, this was a fun focus for our July. 
73
Bruce W9FZ and Janice KA9VVQ