[TVARC] K2PS ARRL June VHF Contest

[George Briggs]

Way to stick with it Pete. Nice narrative.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jun 11, 2024, at 3:44 PM, K2PS Pete Stafford <psk2ps at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> Call: K2PS
> Operator(s): K2PS
> Station: K2PS
>  
> Class: SO3Band-All Modes LP
> QTH: NFL
> Operating Time (hrs): 15
>  
> Summary:
> Band  QSOs  Mults
> -------------------
>     6:  398   107
>     2:          
>   222:          
>   432:          
>   902:          
>   1.2:          
>   2.3:          
>   3.4:          
>   5.7:          
>   10G:          
>   24G:          
> -------------------
> Total:  398   107  Total Score = 42,586
>  
> Club: The Villages Amateur Radio Club
>  
> ‘Twas a tale of two contests.  The first one (the bad one), showed up all day Saturday (2PM start), and up to maybe 1030AM Sunday.  And it was ugly. 
>  
> I just operate on 6 meters for this one (why they don’t have a single-band category, I’ll never know), so I had to enter in the 3-band class, forgoing 144 and 432.  But in my favor, it has seemed, at least most of the times, that our Florida QTH works really quite well on 6 (and also on 10M).  I should add that Low Power is a requirement for this class.
>  
> So, getting back to the first phase, the band was pretty bad.  That means, in these days of digital, that we forget about SSB and CW, and just focus on FT8.  I surely don’t wish to disparage FT8, since in the past, with no signals on SSB/CW, I’d be watching TV with the XYL.  So there was some activity to be seen.  Beyond the initial flurry of local, Florida, stations, there were, once in a while, stations from New England, the Midwest, even as far as Minnesota and Canada.  The problem was that they showed up just once, and then completely disappeared from the waterfall.  Of course, calling these stations was just frustrating.  CQing didn’t help much, either, and I bemoaned my inability to crank up the amp.  In 8-1/2 hours I worked a total of 33 stations, in 12 grids.
>  
> Sunday morning didn’t look much better, with 17 more in the log, in 8 grids, still all FT8, with one exception – worked K3SK on MSK144, thinking that maybe the only propagation was meteor scatter, but no more luck there.
>  
> Since I saw that a few more stations began to show up on the left side of the FT8 window, I figured I’d try SSB/CW.  No one on SSB, but I did manage to work a handful of CW stations, and then tried SSB again.  After a slow start, the skies (well, clouds anyway) opened up, and we were off to the races, starting at about 10A until about 3P.  Between 11A and 2P, I was able to average 81 QSOs/hr.  Did that make up for all the early pain…yeah!  After that, back to FT8 to pick up some stray multipliers, and quit a few hours early.
>  
> At this point in time, it looks as if I’m leading in my 3-Band category, but that’s only for those who posted to 3830, so fingers crossed.
>  
> Thanks to Rusty, W3US, Paul, KM4PIH, John, W4MRJ, and Faith N4FMO for calling in.
>  
> 73, Pete, K2PS
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