This past weekend I was busy and mostly out of the house on Friday night, all day Saturday, Saturday night and all day Sunday. That meant no time on the radio for the 2011 ARRL DX SSB ham radio contest. I did check Facebook and saw some other emails indicating conditions were good, specifically on 15m and 10m, but I wasn’t able to get on the air.

On Sunday we had our local ham radio club’s annual auction and I was there from 10am through 5pm. I guess I could have tried to sneak in a little time before 10am on Sunday morning but I had some other items to deal with. While I was at the auction I checked my phone a few times and saw some posts about decent conditions so I know some folks were probably having a lot of fun. After the auction ended and in the pouring rain and wind, I got home and for about 1 hour I got on the radio and worked stations on 15m and 20m. I checked 10m but it was late with the sun already set and I didn’t hear any signals. In a quick hour I made 40 contacts with nothing exotic. I did hear a JA station on 15 but he faded quickly and I wasn’t going to hang around and see if conditions improved. P40A on 20m who was running 5 watts and booming in as if he was running 1KW.

I hope everyone that did spend time in the contest had a lot of fun. Here’s my short contest summary:

 Band    QSOs    Pts  Cty
   14      22     66   15
   21      18     54   10
Total      40    120   25

Score : 3,000

K2DSL