CW

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

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.

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.

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.

"Mr Murphy" showed up with his whole family this weekend. Spent all my off time fixing stuff or try to minimize things that were too bad to fix at the time.

Conditions were down, so things were slower. Really miss 10 meter, but we'll have to get used to it.

Had a pretty good time, overall. Had enough people and plenty of food. 160 meter 8 circle is still 'AOL'.  Frustrating! Beverages worked really well.  The recent work with filtering and switching paid off. Lots of QRN from far off thunder storms Saturday night.  Made things really tough at times on the low bands.  When the storms causing that thunder arrived on Sunday about 1700 UTC, the rain static from hard rains made things difficult on 15 and 20 meters.