The first night of most contests are usually a tuff go for a low power/limited antenna station like mine so I only operated for a short time to check conditions and My station before calling it a night. I logged contacts on 15m and 40m and skipped 20m because of the first night craziness. I was able to contact a fellow MWA operator on 15m who was using the remote station on Haiti for the contest so that was a big first night highlight.
I started after sunrise Saturday switching between 15m and 10m and only towards evening switching to 20m-- which was very noisy and pile ups were intense. My day was broken up between helping My wife with chores and checking the bands for good openings plus some other distractions. A very casual operating contest day but fun none the less!
My goal was to log more than 100 QSO's but if the bands were good I hoped for closer to 200. Sunday morning started with only over 70 logged contacts but I hoped to log many more. Like yesterday I again concentrated on 10m and 15m although a lot of stations I heard I had already worked on those bands so I was not adding to the log as fast as I had hoped.I finally decided I needed to try 20m to avoid the "Dupes" I was running into on 10m and 15m. I was pleasantly surprised on 20m with the success I was having breaking through the pile ups which on Saturday was not happening. I easily logged contacts to surpass 100 and finished switching to 40m for one final try. I happened to run across another MWA member who was helping with an Italian station so My final contact was on 40m- -MWA start and finish!! Nice!
I ended with 114 contacts for 21,888 as a submitted score but in review I found 2 contacts I think I heard wrong during the exchange.Lebanon and Hong Kong ended up not being ATNO-- all time new ones. Hope I didn't hear any others wrong. Old ears--oh well
73---Tim
