RAC Winter Contest 2010

The RAC winter Contest is one of My favorites because of the casual attitude and the "Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays" addition to most exchanges.Our Canadian neighbors seem to enjoy just the fact so many VE's and VA's are on the air at the same time! This contest runs for 24 hours and it started at My location at 6:00 PM CST Friday and ended at 6:00PM CST Saturday. My goal this year was to have a minimum 50 contacts and maybe all 14 RAC official stations in the log. The official stations would be difficult for a SSB only station, but I would give a good try.

I started Friday night scanning the bands until I finally found activity on 40m.My first contact was VY2RAC but I quickly decided 40m was not full of contesters so I switched to 75m and did a S & P effort. After several breaks from the radio I eventually ended up on 160m where My inverted "L" performed nicely. Not alot of contacts on 160m and I called it a night with about same number of contacts on Friday I had for all of last Years contest--all S & P.

Saturday was not what I expected-- was not feeling 100% and actually spent time on the couch watching the UMD Bulldogs win the title game against Delta! Later in the afternoon I was able to again try the contest and spent time on 20m. I didn't hear any activity on 10m and 15m and was not able to participate when conditions again would have shifted towards 40 and 75m. This contest was fun but I again didn't spend enough time to rack up a better score but the bands seemed to be in good shape and I was able to use three different antennas. The Inverted "L" for 160m, 260 ft dipole for 75m and the butternut HF6V vertical for 20m and 40m and all three performed well. i actually broke some pile-ups and didn't feel like a peashooter station at times. One station even commented on My 20 over 9 signal and I commented on his 30-40 over 9 signal--must have been a pipeline! One other fact- USA and Dx for Me were also scoring opportunities giving 2 points-Nice! I ended up contacting 6 of the 14 RAC special stations! Several on multiple bands.

Results--- QSOs Pts Sec

56 612 18
Score : 11,016

73---Tim