P40L-P49Y Contest Summary Information

One man's meat is another man's suffering ..

The first night was outstanding CONDX between USA and EU. Unfortunately, this normally means worse propagation between EU and the Caribbean area. And in such case of course attention for stations outside the US generally decreases. Obviously, this was one reason that I had extremely low QSO rates by 01z. Later rates turned back to good, US was fine now, but EU signals were not comparable to last year.

Interestingly there seemed to be a propagation duct to UA (Ukraine) and RA6. I worked many of them with very loud signals. The more west in EU the more difficult it was. I worked an extremely low number of EA and CT which should be easy here. Strange world. But the party indeed was between US and EU. I heard extreme pile-ups of ZC4A and P33W. Tons of US stations were calling. The same of course happened for Z60A. It would have been waste of time to fight this pile-up. But even for some "easy" EU multipliers it was hard to get through from P4.

Highlight was a nice 10 min opening to JA (345 degr,15000 km). The JA's called with very good discipline and avoided to create a useless pile-up in this short time-window. This enabled me to pull a total of 9 JA's out of the noise floor. Next night usually had much lower rates, but it was not that drastic difference as reported between EU and US. Zone 17 showed up at 03z, and I got 3 RA9 and 1 UN in the log.

At 04z a big wind-storm started here in Aruba. It caused extreme wind noise in the shack. Even my noise-cancelling headset was unable to cancel it. Later heavy QRN joined the game, too. Fortunately, by the end of the contest the wind and QRN became weaker. With 4 more JA's at second sunrise the contest ended. Congrats to P33W! By support of this year’s propagation he is back in front of me after last year’s luck was on my side. I hope my 1.4M score is good enough for at least number 2 in the World SO Assisted category.

Thanks at this point again to John, W6LD, and Andy, AE6Y, for letting me operate again from their superb station! 73 Mat P40AA, DL4MM