[PVRCNC] N4AF NAQP CW

[Howard Hoyt]

A tale of the good, bad, and the ugly.

The good was the efforts of KE3X to build up PVRC teams and for the
club to follow through.
A nice PVRC presence. For first time entrants; < pls do not judge NAQP
by this weekend ! >
NAQP is a really excellent opportunity to realize what can be done
WITHOUT an amp.
Between W. coast runs and E. coast storms this might not have been our year.

The bad was a steady line of storms kicking qrn way high Apparently
the severity was even worse up toward PVRC/NCe center of Raleigh, but
possibly the 'staying power' of the storm was worse down east.

The ugly was the S9 precip coming off the towers. Seems like every
time it would quiet down, it would pick right back up.

Pretty frustrating calling the # stations we did who would just CQ in
our face, finally 40M opened where I could put the big quad into play
w/o precip. Some lost time was gained. 40M was good, only thing noted
there was I have never seen the band give out; starting about 0300
just not that many signals and few new ones. In retrospect I again
fell into the mistake of finding a good run freq and staying there
rather than swapping off run to radio 2 so I could s&p up new 40m
mults.
Need to wire chair to electrocute self every 15 min.

80M was good to W. coast but very noisy

160M was good but S7 QRN. We seemed to have a pipeline to W9- possibly
due to the lake that had now formed under the radial field. Surprised
to work as far as Az thru the static.

Final results were 945q for about 221.130K
Full breakout @ http://n4af.net/stats

Never so happy to pull the switch @ midnight ;-)

73, Howie

http://n4af.net