Things did not go the way I wanted them to....but when do they ever? Selling our house, and looking for a new one got in the way of going to Hay Bay and using the high antennas. Oh well, "She who must be obeyed" is happy at least.
So instead I stayed at home and operated in bits and pieces, closing down, and leaving the house, when we had a showing.
On top of this I did another couple of goofs, the first one was my AF Gain was turned down and secondly I spent half of my operating time at 10w because I didn't check my power setting. Obviously there's still more to learn with this radio.
The antennas used at home were a 40m off center fed dipole at about 30 feet, and a homebrew 31 foot vertical with 10 radials spread out on the grass. Both antennas worked perfectly and I had great results with them. A total of 120 contacts were made:
66 SSB on 20m
40 SSB on 10m
14 SSB on 40m
Contacts where made with stations in Europe, South America, North America, Africa, and the Middle East.
The bands were up and down with some very deep QSB at times, and the SFI, A, and K indexes were nothing to write home about either.....in fact this morning they're bloody awful:
SFI = 148
A index = 17
K index = 6
SN = 120
It was 30C here in Kingston yesterday with "a lot" of humidity, seems to be cooler today though.
All in all I'm happy with my score, considering I was only a part-time operator.
We'll see what happens next weekend for the VHF Contest.
Good Sunday afternoon, very nice results for going at the contest here and there. Yes the propagation did play havoc on the contest. I was not able to hear any Middle East, South Pacific or Asia for that matter. I had seen them spotted but the atmospheric "hoopla" put a stop to it. I was a little disappointed I was only able to add one new DXCC to my list.
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