07/10/2006 | K3ZT For me, the 2006 IARU HF World Championships were really lots of fun. I am kind of new to contesting, so with each new event, I try to do just a little bit better than I did with the last event. For the IARU HF Contest, I was up and running for just about 20 out of the 24 hours, taking only a few breaks for food and sleep (sleeping... what was I thinking!). For equipment, I was running an Icom IC-718 into an Ameritron AL-811H Amp that only had two out of the four tubes working ("oh no... only half the power output... what a time for this to happen"). For an antenna, I was using a four band ground-mounted vertical, which worked pretty well. In the end, I was happy with the amount of contacts that I was able to make over the four bands that I tried, but by far, the highlight of the event happened early Sunday morning when I was able to make a solid contact with a station in Japan (Wow... pretty neat from my little shack in Pennsylvania). -- K3ZT