Those hams with short memories will note that last year they were struggling to get their DX in the CQWW Contest on 15m (21MHz band for those other readers) whereas this year, with a lot more solar activity, there's been life on 10m (or 28MHz).
Yes, it's been another session of HF madness. For those unfamiliar with this particular activity, Amateur Radio is afflicted by these things called contests and last weekend was the biggest. It was the CQ Magazine World Wide SSB contest. The idea is to make as many contacts to as many locations in a set period, this one's over last weekend, and a strange scoring system that calculates the winner of this mayhem. It's that way, as the HF bands are packed out with stations trying to work each other, some folk spend a lot of time and effort setting up these up, and then a weekend trying to operate until finally the caffiene has no effect.
Okay, so I dabble a bit, I did man G6MC's station for an hour and clocked a few fillers up, but these long contests aren't for me. Unless you can persuade some more operators to fill in the gaps for such as eating, sleeping, and in G6MC's case - milking! The advantage of being on a farm for this is that there's plenty of room round the farmhouse to escape the "monkey chatter" and get your sanity back. A few hours trying to decifer SSB when using a filter wound down to 1.2kHz bandwidth is hard work.
Of course those who don't like these intrusions, there are some bands free of this madness (the WARC ones), but then if you are picky at the end of the contest there are nice DX stations who are desperate to work anyone near the end just for those extra few points, and this means they actually listen! You can always use the weekend to service your antenna setup and then give it a bash on Sunday afternoon when they're desperate.
I took a mixed approach - I did fix my 80m antenna but it's not back up yet, and when I dropped in they handed me the headset to one of the stations and left me to it. The home station stayed off, mainly as I had plenty to do otherwise, sometimes the family needs some attention too.
