VU2LBW

Went into this contest without the time to sling up and test a 40M dipole. When the contest started, 80M was teeming with stations, but I could not work them as I did not have an antenna.

15M turned out to be the best band. It was open through the day here in India. I had long runs most of the day before I moved to 20M later in the evening. 20M was chaos – I could hear RTTY stations from 14.050 to 14.145!

It was nice to work Phil/GU0SUP for the first time. Most runs on 20M slowed down with unruly pile-ups with stations calling on top of each other and continuing to call when I was answering someone. I am certain I would have had many more of the calling stations in the log if they had a little more patience.

It was good to hear a few VU’s on the contest. We had Ram/VU3DJQ from Delhi, Nand/VU2NKS from Thane, Prasad/VU2PTT and Ramesh/VU2RMS from Bangalore, and Aravind/VU2ABS from Chennai. Aravind deserves special mention as this was his first RTTY contest and he got organized in a couple of days to get going. Working without an interface, he used a speaker-mic combination to work AFSK. Pretty good effort!

Here are some claimed scores from VU: