Our 3830 Comments:

PJ2T had the pleasure of welcoming Bob Allphin, K4UEE, and a host of his friends, mostly from the Southeastern DX Club (SEDXC) for this contest. Several of this crew had just returned from the K5D operation, yet remarkably they were still ready for more radio. In addition, Mary Hobart, K1MMH, ARRL's Chief Development Officer was on our crew. Mary is the most senior official from ARRL ever to visit PJ2T, and she did a great job in her first shot at big-power, big-rate contesting.

Have a look at: 

http://asgard.kent.edu/ccc/arrlssb2009/img_9780.jpg

for a photo of Mary and the special greeting we painted on the wall of the shack for her. Dan (N1ZZ), the RigBlaster man and owner of West Mountain Radio painted the ARRL logo during the CW weekend, and I did the lettering last week. One of K4UEE's purposes in arranging this trip was to help expose non-contesters to our niche of the hobby. There were a handful of operators on our crew who had little to zero pervious contesting experience, and yet they were all quick studies who will, we're sure, include contesting in their future radio fun and will help attract others into trying contest operation.

Conditions were awful. We had a terrible time getting good rate the first night because of a high "A" index and extremely bad noise on the low bands owing to rainshowers all through this part of the Caribbean and northern Colombia and Venezuela. Saturday morning was no better as all yagis on the States were aimed at Europe to take advantage of good conditions on that path, especially on 20. The good news, though, was that 15 opened about 90 minutes earlier than in the CW weekend two weeks ago, and we were able to make hay most of the day on 15. Late Saturday afternoon, however, 15 closed to Europe for much of the U.S. and 20 became a zoo because it was the only viable band for a couple of hours. We managed one ESP QSO on 10 with W5PR (TX), but not a peep from anyone else in NA Saturday on 28 MHz.

The second night was almost as bad, with high QRN and weak signals. Then, at 0845Z (4:45 AM local) the commercial power dropped. This was absolutely the best time for this to happen, if it had to happen at all, as it's the slowest hour of the entire contest. We hustled up and got the stations back up on the generator, but lost pretty much an hour of operating time getting it all going. I dumped the 5 gallon can of gas into the generator and then headed out for the all-night gas station to refill the can in case this turned out to be a long failure. As I was driving through the pitch-black village of Soto, the lights came back up, I did a 180, and we got back on the commercial power soon afterward. (We're going to have to work on a better system for switchovers....)

Sunday was so slow that for awhile in the early afternoon our Multi/Multi had degraded to a single transmitter operation, with 20 being the only workable band. Then late Sunday afternoon Wayne (KU4V), fresh from the K5D pileups, worked W7ISG (AZ) at 2134Z (5:35 PM local) and it was off to the races. Wayne quickly spun off 245 more Qs on 10, netting a total of 29 multipliers. This magnificent Pacific scatter opening missed northern New England, all of VE, most of W0, and all of W7 except Arizona, but it was still a big thrill and it boosted our total score by almost 10%. The last Q on 10 was N5IW (TX) at 2317Z. How weird is that?

The highest rate hour of the entire contest was 2200-2300Z on Sunday, with 436 QSOs and 19 new mults. Amazing.

Our Multi/Multi was done with four stations, but there were very few hours that all four of them were needed. The equipment held up well, even through the power failure, but we found out the hard way on Sunday that the Titan II would not tune up on 10. We replaced the band switch in it last year and obviously fouled something up. Our backup AL-1200 did fine after a quick swap.

Thanks to SEDXC and K4UEE for making the trip to Curacao. Special thanks to Mike (ND4V) for buying and bringing some hardware items that I can't get here on the island. I'm also appreciative to SEDXC for the gift of a couple of commemorative tee shirts from our weekend here. We made a lot of new friends and look forward to hopefully seeing many of them back at PJ2T in the future.

And a special HUGE THANKS to Van Fair, W4GIW, for sending down his 1973 CQWW SSB trophy. Van organized a group that operated in the PJ2T shack in October of 73 and won CQWW SSB (M/M). That trophy, which is a gorgeous engraved silver plate, is now hanging in a place of honor in the PJ2T house, with an engraved silver placard that reads "In this building in October 1973 a group of SEDXC members organized by W4GIW won this CQWW MM phone trophy by almost 2 million points." They signed PJ9GIW, posted a score of 11,132,443, and Chaz Cone (W4GKW) who was with us just now in 2009 was on that historic GIW crew. Thanks, Van.

The SEDXC gang also made us the gift of a beautiful framed photo of Chet Brandon, PJ9EE, wtihout whom any of this Curcacao radio activity would ever have happened, scooping a double handful of seashells out of the ocean at the foot of PJ2T's cliff. This is a priceless keepsake that we'll treasure here at the station.

As always, great credit goes to CCC's incredible members who time and again are willing to do whatever it takes to keep this station on the air. It's never easy, but is ALWAYS fun.

Thanks for the contacts. PJ2T made slightly over 16,000 QSOs in this year's ARRL CW and SSB DX events. See you in WPX SSB.

73, - Geoff, W0CG, PJ2DX