6 meter magic band ARRL VHF Contest

Good for you! Ignore the peanut gallery and operate YOUR station the way YOU want! 73, Pete AA8GK

 

I don't enter the contests, but it was a lot of fun answering "CQ Contest" calls over the weekend. The 6 meter band opening on Sunday was great, and I ended up working 19 different states from TN, one double hop e-skip to New Mexico, and 2 New England stations on FM. When Sporadic "E" is in play, it's surprising how much fun you can have on 6 meters. It doesn't take much either (I run 100 watts into a home-brew loop).

 

I'm flat wore out, running 7 bands on 6/2/222/432/902/1296 and 2304 on CW and SSB and Moonbounce on 2/432. Trying to work and find all the rovers in as many as 17 grids was a chore. I managed to still mow the grass. Wonder if that would count as a multiplier? June ARRL Contest always fun!

 

The only thing about some CW operators I find annoying is when I'm trying to catch weak SSB stations on 50.125 are saying so I can make a contact and one of those CW people come right in on top and start banging out their dits and dahs trying to get one of the SSB contacts. And because CW does get through a lot louder most times, those of us with the volume up and head phones on get our ears blasted. I know CW is legal there but it's just plain inconsiderate of those using CW. For those people I hope their key contacts fuse together and their transmitter fries.

Other than that, I made a bunch of contacts on 6 and 2 meter SSB and 6 meter JT65, even though the PWN was up to it's normal lack of propagation for most of the time. It's the first time I've talked SSB since last year sometime as I've been on digital when I've been on and it was good to get the headphones dusted off. We had a bunch of rovers running all over the place, which made for some interesting pileups at time as they went from hilltop to hilltop.

Mike

 

I didn't want to point that out. The other rude thing I noticed was as soon as a station started getting a pile-up a big gun station would pounce on the frequency and take over the Op's pile-up. For a paper award?

Anyways the VHF Contests are always fun for me.

 

Need to up that QSO rate! Talk faster! Saturday night I caught an opening to the upper FM's(17,18,19 etc) and was running 7 stations in the time you worked 4! Talk faster! LOL! Okay now that I am done razzing you 6 was hit and miss for me, when it was open I worked a bunch though, ended with 124 contacts on 6m, 37 on 2m, 14 on 432, for a total score of 18,711.

 

I'm in Vancouver WA (CN85) and looking to get up on 6m soon. Seems like the midwest and east coasters have a lot more fun that we probably can. I did run a dipole for awhile monitoring MSK144 on the newer WSJT-X program (it was added in the newest update). I picked up a few Vancouver Island stations way up north but not much else--but I wasn't running a Moxon or beam.

Have you given meteorscatter a shot?

Hoping to work you in Eugene on 6m sometime. Only 120 miles up I-5 from there to here and I have a clear view to the south. --73

 

What were you running for 902? Its one of the only bands I don't have a decent solution for. Only things I'm finding are FM but I don't know if there are other more all-mode options out there. Not many transverters that I've seen, though I don't know if people are using anything other than FM (in large part) for 902, or if I would only hear non-FM maybe 2-3 times a year during contests.

 

Had a great time running 100W from a PRO3 to my homebrew Moxon at 32'. Really looking forward to building my 4 el LFA and getting it on the tower.

 

I got you beat, LOL i had 250+ worked in my logs on Sunday 6 meters only and that was from around 4 to 7pm. I only use QRZ logbook, and what i didn't realize is QRZ limits you to 100 lookups within 24 hours. So i was looking up then logging, instead of just logging, so i hit that 100 limit in an hour. Started on pen and paper for another 1 hour, all said and done i have 8 contacts on 2 meter SSB, and next time i wont lookup then log tonight (Tuesday) i got another 40.

 

I used N1MM logger for the first time, gets freq from the radio, I just enter call and grid. 6m prop in MN was spotty, some were in it, some were out. I missed part of the opening because I needed sleep LOL

 

CW is great, especially on the MAGIC BAND! Long live CW! Ignore the trolls.

 

Original post video is not CW, so would you kindly stop being the troll..

 

Your email address is missin g in your QRZ profile. QRZ trolls hide their email addresses.

BTW, enjoyed the video. Any mode works great on the magic band. Being agnostic when it comes to modes makes a shack more diverse.

 

Being agnostic is a one way ticket to hell. But you'll be in good company with the other trolls.