The contest was an interesting event. Once 6 meters opened up it stayed open for the most of the rest of the weekend. The higher bands like 144 -1296mhz had average to poor band conditions. Since 6m was open most people focused on that band which negatively impacted the amount of people operating on 144mhz and above.
Image of my temporary shack and operating position:
(I hope to move to my new office later this summer)
The transverters and other support gear are located in the utility room.I operated on a part time basis so I would estimate that my time commitment was around 10 hours.
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On the next set of images you can see which grids and bands were active. I am located in EN25 as your point of reference on the maps.
50mhz QSO Map (
LINK to larger image)
144mhz QSO Map
222mhz QSO Map
432mhz QSO Map
902mhz QSO Map
1296mhz QSO Map
Looking at the maps it is pretty clear that 6m was extremely active and the rest of the operating event was a wash. I could have spent several more hours running in the contest on 6m but I decided that i wanted to try to work the local grids on the higher bands. I pulled the plug 30 minutes before the official end of the contest as 144mhz and upper were quiet.
Summary: The band opening was fun but I would have preferred to work more local stations and across more bands. I suspect that I will see a lot of QSO cards coming in the mail in the near future as my grid is somewhat rare.
73 de NG0R
