I woke up around 1030Z Saturday morning and that was just about the right time as the band was just starting to open. I worked my first QSO @ 10:55Z, DR1A from Germany. It was soon after this that I discovered what was to be my achilles heal in this contest-Europe. Most European stations were S-9 or above on the loop but could not hear me. The inverted vee I put up on the porch was no better. I called and called many stations without even a hint of them hearing me. It was incredibly frustrating to the point I rechecked the SWR and resonant frequencies of both antennas with the SWR Analyzer thinking something must be wrong. Unfortunately nothing was wrong-the antennas were just not performing to EU. I did manage to work a lot of mults in the Caribbean and South America with the inverted vee and even a few loud stations in EU after many calls over the nest couple of hours. The frustration mounted to the point that I had to do something. I decided to scout out a new location closer to the beach for the inverted vee. About 300 feet away across the road near the tennis courts was a location that had a clear view to the water about 250 feet or so from the beach. I then proceeded to move the inverted vee with the Buddipole portable mast to this location and strung 3 of my 100' RG8X sections together back to the Villa. I oriented it broadside NE/SW and guyed it off to keep it standing in the face of the constant 20-25MPH sea breeze. Here is a picture of it with the sea in the far background:
This little project cost me about 1 1/2 hours and I was back on @ 1535Z working SP3HRN for a new country mult. The new antenna was a definite improvement but didn't solve the EU problem. I only had to call stations 4 or 5 times now instead of 10-15 to get their attention. It also seemed to work best for Caribbean and South American stations so it became my main antenna during the daylight hours.
Still I had no ability to run EU. I tried many times in the EU subband (14.100-14.150) to get something going but never could. I also couldn't run stateside during the day at any decent rate due to 2 factors:
1. Most of them were pointing at EU
2. 20M was a war zone during the day with no clear frequencies.
My 100W had no chance of holding a frequency for any length of time.
Having run out of options I decided to search and pounce and go for multipliers. This seemed to be fairly successful as my country and zone count improved considerably.
I did manage to run a few U.S. stations Saturday evening after EU died out but still, I ended the day with only 414 Q's in the log-145 more than I ended with the night before. The last QSO in the log Saturday was PS2T at 0108Z.
Sunday was no better for rate, maybe even a little worse as I ended the contest with 543 QSO's. It got so bad I took a 2 hour nap around noon on Sunday. I had to work hard for every multiplier and ended up with 100 of them (79 countries/21 zones). Almost all of these were in NA and EU. I managed to work a couple of African stations (c50C and 6W1RY) and both VK and ZL. Asia was a bust as I didn't work any JA's or anything else for that matter. I did manage to work KL7RA and a couple of KH6's. I even missed CE and zone 13. The one highlight of Sunday was stringing together about a 20 minute run late in the afternoon including having a couple of EU stations call me (the only time during the contest that happened).
Final result: 543 QSO's/1201 points, 79 countries, 21 zones = 120, 100 points.
All in all I turned in a great single band score....if that band were 160M, for 20M not that hot.
For what it's worth, I managed to beat the old C6 20M LP record (set by C6ALZ in 2003) by abut 60K points. The overall C6 record of 327K points, held by VP7NS since 1973 (wow!) is quite safe for at least another year.
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