ARRL Sweepstakes, SSB

This last weekend was the ARRL Phone Sweepstakes. I was hoping to get lucky and make 376 contacts to go with the 624 I had during the CW contest, to make an even 1,000. As the weekend approached, though, I realized that other obligations were going to turn the contest into an overnight operating event, with no daytime operation. Even if I was operating the whole time the kids were asleep, I'd still need to keep up a rate of 37 QSOs per hour, which is pretty tough for me.

As it turned out, I made exactly 200 QSOs, and got 57 sections, almost all on 40 and 80, plus a few when 20 opened in the AM:

Call: KM6I
Operator(s): KM6I
Station: KM6I

Class: SO Unlimited LP
QTH: Mountain View, CA
Operating Time (hrs): 9

Summary:
Band  QSOs
------------
160:    0
80:  127
40:   61
20:   12
15:    0
10:    0
------------
Total:  200  Sections = 57  Total Score = 22,800

Club: Northern California Contest Club

Comments:

K3 barefoot, G5RV inverted vee at 60 feet.

Family obligations kept this to an overnight effort.

I actually had a nice 20-minute run on 80, working mostly other NCCC members. And, for the first time, I had someone deliberately QRM me. How flattering! I thought I wasn't loud enough to be a target!

But listening to the recording, I have some opportunities to crispen up my phone contesting. I tend to say "QSL," "you are," and "number" when they aren't really necessary, and the pace of my recorded exchange seems positively glacial compared to some of the better operators. On the bright side, I read numbers correctly, giving each number individually, and can more or less type and talk at the same time.

So between the CW and Phone weekends, I contributed 122,640 points to the NCCC club score. This was an improvement of 96,994 points over my scores from last year (4.75 times as many points).