NR4M - The Goat Farm

Was Arnie's, KN4DEB, second ever contest. Very new ham.
The late hours really killed me. Got bed after 2 AM and back up at 6 AM!

As sometime happens with CQWW WPX CW following Hamvention, there was some international flair to the NR4M operation this year. We had Mattieu CE3MVW and Andy YO3JR join us. Add to that KO8SCA, K4GMH, N3UA, CE2MVF, N3AIU, KN3DEB, N2YO, KG3V, KA4RRU, K4GM, W7IY, K7SV and NR4M to round out the list of great ops.

Russian DX Contest

Call: NR4M
Operator(s): NR4M
Station: NR4M

Class: SO CW HP
QTH: va
Operating Time (hrs): 6:00

Started a bit late due to a total crapout of my Flex radio. Then, had to shut down because of lightning and hail! After some time off, I got back on later and worked some on 80.

This was a pleasant change. In the past, I've lamented because they're a bunch of guys that operate from with varying abilities and we just never could get a good, solid team together. I guess the stars were in alignment, as we could not done any better with the number and abilities of the ops that participated. At the end, we still had 7 ops sitting in front of radios. This was the first time most of the ops dealt with the two stations on a band.

Beside the fact that 10 meters was 'stink-o', propagation was OK. As you would expect, the 15 opening was much shorter than the recent past, but did hang in there with QSO's all day long.
40 meters is almost a 24 hour band now, which is always a good thing. I found the low bands to be very quiet, which was nice.

Steve NR4M, Larry K7SV and Ken, K4ZW, split operating time. Steve ran from 22Z until around 03Z and then 10Z until after sunrise both days. Larry ran from 03Z until about 10Z both. Ken came by Saturday evening and operated some of Steve's shift. Noise on the band was very minimal with the transmit antenna being very effective on receive. Conditions were very good within the US both days and west coast signals were
loud.

North American QSO Party, SSB - January

Call: NR4M
Operator(s): NR4M
Station: NR4M

Class: Single Op LP
QTH: va
Operating Time (hrs): 4

Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
160:
80: 44 19
40: 230 34
20: 28 11
15:
10:
-------------------
Total: 302 64 Total Score = 19,328

Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club

Team: PVRC Rappahannock #1

Comments:

Trying to get the hang of SO2R, but wasn't in the cards. Just before the contest my Flex 6700 decided to turn itself into a 'brick'.
Still not a lot of antenna choices here for domestic contests. 20 meters is the worst, with the lowest antenna I can turn west is at 120 feet. The lower in frequency I go, the more appropriate the antenna choices.

Never had so many dupes in a contest.   I was spotted a couple times as NR-3-M. Hope everyone had a good time.