There were a couple of contests this weekend with the NAQP SSB taking place Saturday. Its a 12 hour contest and you can operate for 10 hours, though I spent much less time on the air for this one. Though a SSB contest feels to be the most work, I really enjoy being able to chat with folks, especially those I’ve come to know be it from many contests, comments on my blog or discussion lists, or even some I’ve met in person.

I took a break from the 2nd of 3 sessions in the SARTG RTTY contest and made a bunch of contacts in this contest. When things slowed down I switched back to the SARTG contest for a bit and then came back later. Conditions were dead for me on 10m whenever I took a quick check and 15m wasn’t all that good either, so most time was spent on 20m. After about 2.5 hours I needed to head out for a few hours.

I got back on around 8pm and worked  20m and 40m for another 2.5 hours before calling it quits pretty early. I didn’t work much  on 80m but maybe activity picked up after I ended things on my end. At least on Saturday the weather was ok with no thunderstorms like we had Friday evening and what looks like is about to happen here again as I’m writing this up.

I didn’t notice any oddball names since names are part of the exchange. Sometimes you get some good ones that make you chuckle. All the ops were super friendly and it was nice having a quick hello with the likes of K5ZD, N1SNB, and others.  Looks like I worked about 37 states & 5 Canadian provinces with a few nearby states missed I’d normally/easily work on 80m.  Here’s my score summary:

  Band    QSOs    Pts  Mlt
   3.5       4      4    3
     7      41     41   25
    14      81     81   28
    21      13     13    8
 Total     139    139   64

Score : 8,896

Thanks for the nice contacts!
K2DSL