2005 ARRL June VHF Contest
Somehow, the Propagation God's were grinning widely upon Southern California Saturday Afternoon shortly after the Contest started and stayed that way past 1800 local time.
All of the frustration from January was wiped away (see the January 2005 Soapbox entry), roughly 210 contacts and 67 grid squares on 6 meters alone made the scoring higher than I thought would ever be possible from this corner of the States. Other bands were virtually dead locally while everyone was taking full advantage of the band opening on 6 meters.
At about 1800 local time as things were winding down, activity up the coast and in to mid-California started to pick up - as did new bands and grid square multipliers.
Sunday was a complete wipe-out on 6 meters, with most local operators reporting the same S7 to S9 static and noise levels in all eastern directions from Southern California. Other bands were better, there was a fair amount of workable traffic and stations east in to Nevada and Arizona, then later in the day, to Mid and Northern California on 144/220/432 and higher.
Interesting trends - for the past two years, a relatively constant volume of traffic is FM, not SSB. This usually works out to be 20 to 30% of my total scoring. This year, almost NONE of the score was FM, for reasons unknown. Another was stations that operated with Vertical Polarization (yes, even with SSB) - that too was down, resulting in a small part of my score this time around (yes, I run vertical omni's for all bands up to 2304 in addition to yagi's or loops).
It looks like at least two new Section Records were set for San Diego in '05, looking for final data to see if others were able to enjoy the six meter opening on Saturday in efforts to push other records as well ....
'73 - -- KG6IYN
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