Friday, October 22, 2010

Day 7 – last day of operation, 10m dead, 15m ordinary, nothing on 40m, no long path America’s on 20m but got 200 Europeans in the log on 20m SSB – need sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! GRAND TOTAL – 3617 QSOs into 93 countries

I had my lowest number of QSO’s for the day which was 216. It was probably a combination of poor solar conditions and the fact that a lot of people already had me in the log for the bands that were open, ie 15m in the afternoon/evening and 20m at night/early morning – although 10m was clearly dead, can’t complain though, the past three days on 28 MHz was fun.

But still I clearly exceeded my expectations, I only printed off 2000 QSL cards for this trip and I thought that was a little optimistic. I figured 300 QSO’s per day average over a 7 day holiday would be a lot. But the final number of QSO’s turned out to be almost double that with 3617 QSOs (516 Q’s per day). Don’t worry folks if you’re in the log you’ll still get a card, I’ll be printing off another 2000 in the next couple of weeks. In the coming few days I’ll be interested to see the breakdown of the QSO’s, the clear winners are Europe 20m SSB and JA 15m SSB.

I’m very sorry that not many America’s got in the log, it was due to the mountain blocking North/Central/South America short path, most of VK, ZL and long path Europe. But as a consolation, my wife has agreed for us to take a couple of little weekend trips to Magnetic Island which is OC-171. I did do a quick trip which wasn’t well planned and I went there at the last minute to a terrible location which blocked almost everyone due to it being in the mountainous bay, that trip netted only 124 logs over 3 days, compared to the 3617 over 7 days for this trip. So at least I’ve learnt a lot second time around. My wife and I will do a little day trip for recognisance and we’ll visit some potential locations with my compass and great circle map in hand. I believe I know a place which has a water take off short path to Europe, JA and most importantly USA. This trip ticked two of those boxes, my next one needs to tick all three.

So there’s CQWW SSB this coming weekend, so we might go for a relaxing ‘family day’ the following weekend for the day to check things out as the weekend after that I think it’s JIDX SSB. So at least some time in November I’ll have an idea of a potential three day style weekend DXpedition to OC-171......... yes I have a very understanding wife, but I haven’t been too selfish, the trade off is a Pacific Island cruise of her choice and design next year visiting YJ, FK8 and 3D2 – with NO radios – as soon as I booked this DXpedition she found and booked the cruise – hi hi.  

GRAND TOTAL – 3617 QSOs into 93 countries

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