Hello all, I just concluded my Major Edwin Howard Armstrong special event operation, which I conducted at my home station here in Bluff City, Tennessee. I did all of the operating myself and I operated on 15, 20, 40, 80 and 160 meters. My event began on 0000Z 18 December and concluded at 2359Z 20 December. My event was in honor of Armstrong's birthday, which was December 18. I made a total of 1,322 QSOs. My antennas are not set up for working USA stations, due to their heights and low angles of radiation, but I worked all the US stations that I could copy - 407 QSOs with the States. There were two contests going on at the same time as I was operating my event - the Canadian RAC contest and the Croatian 9A contest. Some of those contest stations have BIG signals, which made copying the weaker signals somewhat of a challenge. But I think that I did OK; I even managed to put a few QRP stations in the log! A number of interesting stations called me - Macedonia, Turkey, Zambia, Israel, Australia and New Zealand. All in all, I was very happy with the interest that hams around the world had in my special event. Now I have an appreciation of what the DX-pedition operators go through. At times, there were so many calling me at once and it was just noise. It was sometimes very difficult to pull out one or two characters of a call during these times. But again, I think that I did OK. The main reasons why I decided to conduct this special event were because, nowadays, there is so little activity on the CW sub-bands (except during contests) and also because most people, hams included, have never even heard of Armstrong and the very important inventions that he made, which made AM & FM radio, TV and cell phone communication possible. I am already looking forward to next year's W4A event. This summer, I am planning on putting up some temporary antennas that will favor QSOs with the USA and I will also try to put up some efficient antennas for the WARC bands. December 18 of next year falls on a Saturday, which will only give me two days of operation but I am setting for myself a goal of 2,000 QSOs. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and see you on the (CW) bands! 73 de Brad, N9EN (ex-W4A)
