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Florida QSO Party 2016

Posted: 02 May 2016 04:58 AM PDT
https://ke9v.net/2016/05/02/florida-qso-party-2016/


I had the radio on Sunday morning, listening for NPOTA activity on 20
meters. The band was quiet — as in dead. That may have been why I left it
on when I walked out of the shack. A few hours later, I was busy with
something else when I heard someone calling CQ.

Turned out to be a Florida station working the QSO Party.

That got me back in the shack and I worked that fellow and then a few more.
I didn’t really have time for the activity at that point, we needed to
leave soon. With eight Q’s in the log, I figured I’d get ten and call it a
day. I hadn’t planned to work the FQP this year anyway.

In just a few minutes, ten were in the log, I pulled the switch, and headed
out the door. Total operating time might have been 15 minutes.

A little later while doing the paperwork to send in a log, I discovered
that despite my brief appearance in the operating event, I had managed to
pull off the Spelling Bee� sweep. Using letters from 11 stations worked to
spell SUN — a small victory, but I’ll take it.

I submitted my log and it immediately came back with an error. Turns out,
my logging program called this the Florida QSO Party while the contest
robot insisted it was the FCG-FQP contest. Since I hate arguing with
robots, I made the necessary name change and then it liked my entry.

All contacts were on 20 CW as a single-op, running 100 watts. So 10
contacts, 7 unique counties works out to 280 points best I can figure so
that’s what I claimed. Band conditions weren’t optimal and rapid fading
made things a bit more interesting than the usual pipeline we enjoy from
Indiana. But there are plenty of great operators in Florida, and the truth
is, I enjoy operating burst-mode in such events as much as any other on air
activity.