This past weekend, along with the NAQP SSB contest was the January VHF contest. I spent Saturday working the NAQP contest and on Sunday I was going to either drive around and work 2m & 70cm from my car in the 4 grid squares (FN20, FN21, FN30 & FN31) for anyone in the area, or work from my home. With the snow the day before I didn’t feel like clearing off the roof of the car, so I decided to make some contacts from home. I thought I’d get on once, work the locals, and get off, but I did a bit more than that. I really was going to spend Sunday focusing on football. Though the NY Giants were playing at 6:30pm ET I wanted to also watch the other playoff game between the Ravens and Patriots.

I have a Diamond dual band vertical I use for FM operations but also can use it for SSB, though it’s not very efficient, especially on 70cm. For 6m, I can tune up the G5RV. Again, not extremely efficient, but it works. In most cases, if I can hear a station, they will hear me. So I configured N1MM, connected the antennas, and fired up the radio. I made some local contacts on 2m and 70cm and checked 6m. I made mostly local 6m contacts and then took a break waiting for one of the locals to get on in the early afternoon. I kept checking back from time to time taking a quick scan of the bands, though really on 6m had much of any activity. I worked a couple on 6m, and then switched to 2m to work them there and only a couple I even attempted on 70cm.

In some radio checks throughout the day, Florida started coming in. When they come in, they are as loud as the locals and working them is cake on 100w and my G5RV. Sometimes they come and go in the matter of a minute and sometimes they are there for a long time. On Sunday they seemed to last for a while (15+ mins) and booming in. I ended up logging 6 Qs to GA, 6 Qs to FL, 1 to AL and 1 to MS. I didn’t log a MS station on Saturday during the NAQP SSB but log a MS station on Sunday on 6m in a random check of the radio. Go figure!! Even worked a couple of stations on 6m I worked the day before on HF.

Here’s my score summary from the contest:

 Band    QSOs    Pts  Grd
   50      39     39   15
  144      14     14    5
  420       3      6    2
Total      56     59   22

Score : 1,298

Here’s a screenshot of the contacts using http://levinecentral.com/adif2map (click to enlarge):

Once the Giants playoff game started I didn’t get back on the radio. The Giants won and head to the SuperBowl to face the Patriots again, like they did 4 years earlier. Hopefully, the outcome will be the same!

73,
K2DSL