[PaQSO] Early Thoughts, N3SH/ALL - SSB

[Ron Notarius W3WN]

Strange conditions.  40 seemed long most of the time, 15 was open quite a bit but no one was there.  75 was open a lot earlier than expected on Sunday (which was good for our score, mind you), and I now wonder if we should have gone to 75 a lot earlier on Saturday rather than fight on 40 and the high bands.

We ended up with only one transmitter at the phone side at N3XI's QTH (N3SH/ALL CW was at K3VX's across town, about 5 miles away).  This was in part due to worries over intermod, in part because most of the ops (except N3XI and myself) were rookies (and they did VERY, VERY well!), and in part because... well, we thought he had another rig, and he thought we were bringing one...

Worked ALL 48 states on the continent; never heard AK & HI(PAC), or for that matter PR & VI, and those are the only US sections we missed.  Worked about half of the VE provinces.  Fell short about 15 counties, at least some of which we know the CW guys got, so we're keeping our fingers crossed when we merge the logs for the county operation.

Offhand, we had 760 QSO's, about 120 mults, and total score broke 100 K.  Will have more once I get the logs loaded on the personal computer and dissected.

One other thought... the next time the bonus station is going to run multi-county, like we did and like W3UU did a few years ago, I hope the software handles it better.  Most people didn't have a problem, but a few had fits fighting with their computer, and there's at least 2 or 3 stations that insisted that we were in one of the other SES station's counties and logged us wrong.  Sometimes operator error starts between the ears... you gotta listen!

73, ron w3wn
n3sh/all - ssb