[TxHam] Thank you.

[Mike Olbrisch]

I would like to thank everyone for voting for my QSL card.  I am truly
grateful that you thought enough about me to consider my card, then vote for
it.  That alone made me feel good.  Thank you.

Although I knew my card looked good, I also realized I was competing against
a club station QSL card.  A club from Austin, a large city with many hams.
Forget the "Naturalist Lifestyle" the club says they endorse, it is still a
club from a large city with a huge ham population.  I was just a little guy,
from a little city that much of Texas seems to think belongs to New Mexico.
So I knew from the start there was a very good chance they could take it
just by asking for friends to vote.  

I got on several E-mail reflectors and asked for your support.  The Sun City
ARC got behind me, KA5TRQ posted it in the newsletter.  Many of the
Armadillo group voted for me.  In the last three hours of the contest I even
got on Echo-Link and contacted stations in OK and TX to ask them to vote for
my card.  I did everything I could think of to pull it off.  And win or
lose, I knew we had done our best.

So how did it end?  There were three finalists.  Each finalist won a Wouxun
dual-band HT.  They were awarded to us at the event. The grand prize was an
MFJ-249B antenna analyzer.  Oh-how I wanted to win that analyzer.  But I had
resigned myself to the fact that I was competing against a big city club.
The three of us finalists were standing there in front of a packed room,
folks standing around the sides and back.  And they announced "The winner
is......

To find out who won, I am going to ask you to go look at ALL the cards.
There were some truly beautiful cards entered.  Many of them were truly
worthy entries.  I am in awe that I was even considered as a finalist
against some of those cards.  Honestly, had I seen some of those cards
before I entered, I would not have bothered.  Please go look.  Many of them
deserved to win.

This link is to a .PDF.  I just downloaded it and my computer didn't die or
start smoking.  It's safe.  Watch the wrap.

http://arrlwgd.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/QSL-Contest-with-Win
ner-WG5L-Modified.pdf 

Again, thank you for voting for me.

Vy73 - Mike - KD9KC.
El Paso, Texas - DM61rt.
W5-SOTA Association Manager.
NA-SOTA info: http://na-sota.org/