Lousy Propagation...

As expected the propagation for this years ARRL International DX Contest was pretty bad.  At 2020 UTC on March 2nd the propagation numbers were SFI = 70, SN = 0, A-Index = 24, and the K-index = 2.

The surprise of the day on Saturday was the fact that 15m was open.  I managed to work a pile of South American stations, but none from the EU.  It seemed to be strictly north-south propagation only.....however, 20m was open in the EU, but not into South America.

There were lots of stations calling CQ, and most of them had big pile-ups answering them.  Nevertheless, most of the stations calling CQ seemed to be using far too much power and their antennas couldn't hear those answering.

In fact, I received an on-air lecture from a KP4 station who after breaking in to ask what I was running, proceded to tell me that I was wasting peoples time by only running 100w into a wire antenna, and I should just go away and leave the contesting to the "real hams".  According to this master of amateur radio, a person needs at least a three element beam and 1000w to contest properly.  The poor guy had a major heart attack when I signed QRP.... I wasn't - but it was fun listening to the idiot fly into an even deeper rage for another five minutes about the evils of QRP, and the great damage it does to the hobby.  Maybe I should mention that the KP4 had been a ham for a total of two years ..........

Sunday wasn't much different from Saturday, lousy propagation and guys who couldn't hear too well. A number of hams mentioned that this year their scores were way down from last year, in fact, most were down by more than half.  I guess that's what happened at the bottom of the cycle.

The CQ World-Wide DX Contest is coming up at the end of the month, so I better get working on a new antenna system, so I too can become a "real ham" and compete with the big boys 😎