This Saturday, we operated the MI QSO Party—I operated on Saturday down at the Hands-On Museum. To avoid any confusion, we used the W8CWN callsign.
I got to the museum around 10 am, and the contest didn’t start until noon, so I fiddled around a bit, trying to figure out how the bands were. I made three contacts on 40m and a couple of contacts on 20m, so it looked like band conditions were going to cooperate.
When noon hit, I was off and running. Switching back and forth between 40m and 20m, I made a total of 90 contacts in the next two hours, including three DX contacts. Not stellar, but not bad, either.
Having my WinKeyer certainly helped. As I’ve mentioned, the Omni VII doesn’t have a built-in memory keyer, meaning that in previous contests, I had to bang out the CQs myself. The WinKeyer improved the process immensely.
On Sunday, Jim, K8ELR, opened the station up around 12:30. I joined him about 2:15.
Unfortunately, the band conditions weren’t so good on Sunday. We managed to eke out only one CW contact on Sunday.
Coming Up
Next Saturday, April 24, we’ll be conducting another One-Day Tech Class. There’s still room, so if you know someone that would like to attend, have them e-mail me at cwgeek@kb6nu.com.
