2018-01-15
I participated in the UBA PSK63 prefix contest
As planned I participated in the UBA PSK63 prefix contest in the weekend. Activity was Saturday evening and Sunday morning interrupted by some good sleep. Compared to my experiences in the ARRL RTTY roundup one weekend earlier the 40 meter band decided to act quite differently. On Saturday evening it was quite hard to make a contact. A lot of interference, no far away stations and it was hard to get heard by the other side. I stopped before 22:00 UTC (23:00 localtime) because I thought some sleep would be more effective than getting annoyed by the lack of contacts. Indeed, Sunday morning things got better although I heard only nearby signals on the 40 meter band, including some Belgian stations. No serious DX. Belgian stations are good for extra multipliers so it was good for the score. In the end I made 76 contacts. The last contact was started by a CQ I called at 11:59 UTC but it was only answered at 12:00, so it does count but I had to note it in the log as originating at 11:59 where the software normally logs the moment I see the callsign for the first time. Log submitted and de Veron afdelingscompetitie updated. Update 2018-01-23: The calculated claimed score is 4636 points. Checking the Contest results UBA PSK63 prefix contest 2018 site shows not a lot of Dutch activity in the SO40 category, so I will probably end up relatively high. This does show the merits of planning for a certain category. Update 2018-02-28: The results are in: 75 contacts confirmed, 61 multipliers, resulting score 4575 points. In the SO40 category #21 in general, #20 Europe and #1 the Netherlands. Ok, there were no other participants from the Netherlands.
