Ryan (KB9OWD) and I got our families together for a mini vacation at a lake home in northern Wisconsin (EN46). I dragged up hundreds of pounds in radio gear from home. I was able to get a new 432 yagi setup and upgraded two coax runs to LMR-400 by Friday night before KB9OWD got up. The 6m yagi and 2m yagi were setup from a previous operation on a rotor at 25 feet on the roof. I also put up an extra 6m 4-element yagi at 30 feet that was rotated by hand. We stayed up late until early Saturday morning assembling the dual IC-746s, FT-736r, 3cx800 amps, computers, and consuming a few 807! Other than some computer interfacing/audio
issues, setup went well.

On 6m, we had Es on and off from different parts of the country. We ran FT8 until signals got loud and then switched to SSB for the runs. We noticed it took a couple hours into the contest for people for find SSB again. When the rate would slow to nothing, we jumped back on FT8 and mostly
snagged grid mults. KB9OWD and I are QSO rate junkies and we got our fix! Our best hour rate Saturday evening was 171 QSOs. It was slim pickings for any local 2m activity. Most of our mults there came from meteor scatter. 432 was almost impossible as we had miles of thick mature forests and hills around us.

We were amazed to work over 1000 QSOs and 215 grids on 6m! It has been years since I’ve had this much fun in a radio contest!

73,

Justin, K9MU