I knew I had minimal time to operate this weekend and the conditions for me were not there when I was on the air. Fri night when the ham radio contest started I occasionally turned the radio on and scanned the 10m band for any sign of life but didn’t find any. 10m at night for me seems to have a high noise level which didn’t help but there were no signals that I could hear so after Fri night I had logged zero contacts.

Saturday I was away all day and when I returned Sat night, it was the same as on Friday night – noise and no signals. In 2 or 3 scans of the band I heard nothing – not even local operators. At the end of Sat night I had logged zero contacts.

Sunday morning I got on and the noise was low but there still wasn’t much activity but at least a station or 2 to log. Off and on throughout the day as I was in and not doing other things (holidays and vacation coming up quickly), I took a listen on the band and would log whoever I could hear (and they could hear me). 10m is amazing in that I could hear a station and within 1-2 mins they could be completely gone and I not hear a thing. In order for me to make contacts with my 100w and 10m dipole, I need to be at the radio and constantly scanning 10m in hopes of catching someone in those 1-2 mins I could hear them. As the sun set (ok, well no sun on Sunday as it was raining hard all day) the noise level increased and I stopped checking the band.

I at least ended up with some “DX” on 10m. Some of those DX stations were in the 1000+ contact range as they need to hand out serial numbers. Towers and power is what they have.

Here’s my score summary and a map of the 15 contacts made on Sunday. The 1 CW contact I made was with W2AW which is a contest call used by N2GM, a fellow BARA club member and one heck of a CW operator!

  Band  Mode  QSOs    Pts  Cty
    28  CW       1     4    1
    28  USB     14     28   11
 Total  Both    15     32   12

 Score : 384

Click the map for a larger view.

73!
K2DSL