After the recent replacement of the SpiderBeam Jason KS5TX just couldn’t resist to drive down to Uvalde and have some real fun in the Worked All Europe RTTY contest. “A bit late notice”, he said; but… I think he planned it as such to have the station all to himself. And good for him!
He got off to a bit of a slow start. Conditions on 15 and 20 meters weren’t really that good. Main reason though: someone had left the shack a mess the weekend before; so that cost him several hours…
But: once Jason hit 40 meters QSOs came rolling in at the speed of light! He got a truck load of contacts there, holding his own CQ frequency; and even logged some QTC. That, with all the noise on 40, is downright impressive!
So on he went, no doubt on a bit of a QSO rate high, working all the juicy DX and multipliers 🙂
Jason only had one day to play; and K5WW double-booked himself so he took over on Sunday. For 2 hours; his internal clock is still on summer time. Logged some more QSOs, mainly USA stations. Nothing big there.
It’s safe to say that 40 meter add-on works like a champ! With limited time available we didn’t work any new DXCCs; but looking at the DX cluster spots KN5S got spotted 3 times in 9 minutes on 40 meters.
Yes, with 100 Watts. Not too shabby!!
One of those spots was 2.1 kHz off; but that’s what you get with AFSK.
Thanks for spotting anyway, bud!
All in all: not too bad for a bit over 7 hours of playing. A total of 192 QSOs, score pending. And more QSOs on 40 than 15 and 20 combined, that’s promising!
It was great to warm up the spider.
Warming up spiders? You do know they are cold-blooded, exoskeleton creatures, don’t you?
I hope that doesn’t mean you just burnt the whole thing! 🙂