With the wind blowing and rain pounding down outside during the first serious storm of the Fall season, it was a perfect weekend for contesting. Despite poor propagation predictions for the higher bands, we nevertheless anticipated promising conditions under rising sunspot numbers, and were not disappointed.
Our 9-member team was comprised of Sheldon VA7XH, Thomas VE7TXL, Jan VA7VJ, Robert VA7FMR, Andrew VA7LGN, John VE7TI, Manvir VA7BKI, John VA7XB and Jeanne VA7QD, an experienced contest operator who was participating with SARC for the first time. To operate in the multi-single category we made use of our Icom IC-7610 exciter, Expert Linear 1.5 amplifier running 1 kw to a TH7 multi-band beam, all of which performed without problems. Fortunately, both the Spid rotator and controller had been earlier repaired by Steve VE7SXM, and were up to snuff.
The team operated all times except the after midnight hours on Saturday and Sunday. By 9am both days European stations were starting to emerge and activity picked up rapidly thereafter. All bands between 80m and 10m were open at some time for extended periods, and even 40 and 80m held up during the late evening hours despite our “compromise” wire antenna. Noteworthy DX prefixes worked included: 3B8 (Mauritius), 4X (Israel), 9K (Kuwait), 9M2 (Malaysia), YB (Indonesia), HZ (Saudi Arabia), JT (Mongolia), P2 (Papua New Guinea), V8 (Brunei) and SV5 (Dodecanese) for a total of 91 countries on all continents except Antarctica. In the windup hours, Jeanne was kept super busy with deep pileups from US callers throughout her shift to push the final count up to 1006 contacts for a claimed score of 677730 points. Well done, all!
~ John VA7XB