by Scot, K9JY
What a great contest! The ARRL CW Contest offered it all of us in Costa Rica…a little Murphy lurking at the beginning of the contest, some issues with keyers and software, great runs on all of the bands and the normal sleep deprivation.
And a bonus, for this time of the sunspot cycle: a two hour ten meter opening Sunday afternoon resulting in 120 QSO’s and 28 multipliers. Hopefully, we made those 120 hams on the other end a little bit happy. We were pretty jazzed over it all.
For our two operating positions, we hit 300 QSO’s an hour a couple of times and had great good runs on all of the bands, including 160 meters.
Our preliminary score is 6,000 QSO’s and about 5.5 million points.
And a really nice time — thanks to our hosts, Keko and Sophie.
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by Scot, K9JY
We had a good contest as TI5N here in Costa Rica. Raw score a bit of 6.0 million before submission. We’re going to submit the score from here.
QSL’ing for the contest and TI5N is through the manager.
The TI5/xxxx call signs we are using outside of the contest should be QSL’d to the home call.
Monday and today we took a side trip to the Pacific Ocean and a resort called Punta Leona. Stayed overnight, sat on the beach, had a good glass of wine and generally hung out not doing much. Exactly what I need from a vacation.
Of course, we had to try a little radio stuff. N7OU brought along a K1 and we strung up a 50-foot wire on the beach. The K1 puts out 1.5 watts and with a AA-battery amplifier puts out 3.0 watts into the antenna. From the beach, he worked one stateside station and got a 449 report. Pretty wild.
Here’s a picture of the beach at Punta Leona:
It’s a tough life of a DXpeditioner, but someone has to do it. I volunteered.Scot, K9JY
by Scot, K9JY
So…off to bed to get a good nights sleep before the contest tomorrow night.
Here’s what we did today:
- Set up the laptops
- Set up the radios and interface devices
- Set up the amplifiers
- Modified the 80-meter dipole for CW off from SSB
- Tested the set up on 15, 17, 20, 30, 40, and 80 meters. Working fine.
Most frustrating thing for the day:
Calling CQ on 80 meters for a half hour on both RTTY and CW and only working 4 stations on CW (EU and NA).
A good day. We’re ready to go. We’ll be on the air in the morning as well. The rest of our group arrived today and they are a little tired. Sleep is a good thing.
73 until tomorrow…
Scot, K9JY
