During the last two weekends it’s been the RSGB Affiliated Societies Contests 2012, 80m CW and SSB at first I wasn’t really setting out to take part, just considered giving away some points to those giving it a serious bash, but even so was easy to make a good amount of QSOs in an afternoon.
The first leg was CW, I will admit I know very little CW, I can make out my callsign and 59 but that really is my limit so I setup MixW and CW Skimmer to act as my ears, which like normal worked perfectly. After 5 QSOs, I got into the flow of things and started working my way up the CW portion of the band, within two hours I managed to work 58 QSOs. Conditions seemed reasonable and every station I called came back.
The QSO amount was also an improvement over 2011 where I’d worked 43 stations using a 80m Quarter Wave Inverted L so least I managed to increase the total for this year slightly.
This weekend saw the SSB leg of the contest, at dead on 14:00 I worked Rob (M0VFC) operating G3PYE and then started to work my way back down the band. Which worked well slowly getting more contacts in the log, there was the usual QRM from stations splattering each other but even so there was only two stations who I didn’t manage to work, this might be due to conditions, QRM or my antenna not being that great even so the half size G5RV with 80m traps worked well.
I wasn’t worried after two hours S&P, I’d put 60 QSOs in the logbook and called it a day. What I did learn was that I needed to sort out keying the FT950’s DVK within Win-Test so I’ll be sorting some LUA scripts out in due course as it will be handy for other contests as well.
Overall very enjoyable two weekends, now need to look at what other contests I want to take part in this year.