For those JA stations that didn’t get
in the log I apologise but I was trying. Again there were hours of unproductive
CQ calls in the morning as there were very few signals on 15m. The routine
continued by visiting 20m for long path Europe but conditions were not as good
on 20m with few callers in the 0330-0445 UTC period. With a bit of DX cluster
help again from Ray VK4NH the rate increased. I decided to stick with 20m at
this time of day to give those stations with modest antennas and power a
chance. I would love to give the big guns 3 bands for the IOTA marathon but the
focus was to give everyone the chance to get a new IOTA. So the rate was a lot
a slower but more people should be happy. An analysis of the log earlier today
revealed that the number of JA logs were very low. I was hoping they’d find me
on 20m in the 1030 UTC onwards period when I start looking for North America
but that only really occurred on the first day.
As soon as the European
pile up subsided at 0745 UTC I went to 15m and called CQ and I was getting
ready for the JA onslaught as most people there would be home from work at that
time of the late afternoon. I couldn’t believe that 30 minutes of CQ’ing only
resulted in a VK8, two DU’s, two JA’s and V51GB. It was so unproductive that
V51GB kept on calling every 5-10 minutes to say I was strong and he didn’t know
where everyone else was!!!! This was going nowhere so I went back to my 20m
frequency at 0815 UTC and after a couple of CQ’s a two hour pile up into Europe
occurred. I tried Japan, sorry. As per usual I had a meal break and worked into
North America for a couple of hours before the band closed quite early at 1230
UTC.
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