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Looks like Air Force QSO party interest is sliding. This year's party was not only marked by somewhat lackluster participation, but the bands weren't in exactly the best of shape with the exception of late Sunday afternoon. A sizeable magnetic storm occurred on Saturday and basically shut down most of the HF bands after dark. Sunday they came back, but late in the afternoon there was a strange Aurora effect observed on all bands from 80 meters clear on up to 10m meters. We heard aurora propagation even hit the 6m band! It was quite novel to work stations in western Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire on 20m during the daylight hours and hear that Gravel Girty effect from the Auroral reflections.
The bad news is we didn't score very big and FARA participation was at an all time low compared to prior years. Maybe the weather was too nice! As in the past the operating pace was casual and many participants wanted to do some rag chewing, especially if they new the call or were ever based on Otis. If you missed the chance to operate K1AIR, you missed a unizue opportunity to listen to a lot of reminiscing about the Cape in the 60's and 70's and the chance to learn and practise some contest skills in a calm and pleasant environment. Judging from the lack of activity during the QSO party, I'd guess the scores are not going to be killers this year so maybe we didn't fare too badly.
FARA's 2000 Air Force QSO Party Scores
| Summary Sheet, K1AIR Multiop | ||||
| Total QSO Points | 4,393 |
Total AFB's | 5 |
|
| Multiplier | 38 |
Pts/AFB | 100 |
|
| QSO Points | 166,934 |
Bonus | 500 |
|
| Bonus Points | 800 |
AIR calls wkd | 1 |
|
| Total Pts. | 167,734 |
Pts/AIR call | 300 |
|
| Bonus | 300 |
By the way, this represents 229 QSO's
For those who like to do comparisons to prior year's performance:
2000 |
1999 |
1998 |
|
| QSO's | 229 |
289 |
934 |
| Score | 167,734 | 185,672 | 557,294 |
Postmortem
If this isn't a downward trend, I don't know what is! What else can we do to get people out for operating events like this one? We talked it up at club meetings, we had it on the web site, still few takers. We had cheat sheets, operating aids, and at least one person available to help with logging and operating. Operating was reduced to a push button or two - how much simpler could it be? Logging with the computer - well there are them what do and them what don't. Not sure what more can be done there - if you're afraid of a keyboard and computer, nothing is likely to help! Sorry there are no pictures this year, I had my hands full with getting the operating setup going by the start of the event, so there was not much time for photography. Even if there had been time, there weren't many people to take pictures of!
Many thanks again this year to Gene, N1LNB, the CAP, and to Mitch, KC1TI for helping with securing the use of the CAP building alongside the flight line. Also, special thanks to you Gene, on behalf of all of FARA for the hours you put in making sure that everyone had access to the building.
Many thanks to the setup crew that magically showed up to get the antennas up and the stations going, and also to the crew who helped take down on Monday. We probably learned a thing or two about putting our military tower up in high winds! Not hard, but definitely requires at least 2 people per guy position to make it go smoothly!
The CT logging program we used still hasn't changed to make it any easier to log this type of event which has it's own "non-standard" exchanges. The so called DXpedition mode is really not suitable for this kind of event and I still haven't found one that is! Maybe next year?
73 de Saul, K1BI/K1AIR
Updated: 10/28/2001
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