Ken Harker WM5R
2007 ARRL 10 Meter Contest - Phone Only K5TR (WM5R, op. )

I always have fun in this contest. One of these years, George will want to operate the contest himself, and I'll have to find another station...

The sporadic E propagation was simply spectacular this year. The last year I had a 200 hour in this contest was 2002, and this year I nearly had two in a row. Friday night was fantastic, with over 750 QSOs and 30 states in the log before propagation closed for the night. I did not work my first non-XE DX QSO until Saturday, and even then the selection was thin: a few Caribbean stations in single-hop or double-hop range, a scattering of southern South Americans, and a couple of South Africans. I never heard a VK/ZL station, unfortunately. Almost all of my QSOs in North America were single-hop Sporadic E contacts. I did make one QSO with a station in Massachusetts, a distance outside the normal single-hop range. Inside the single-hop range, the only multipliers missed were DC, MB, and SK.

I made QSOs in 35 of the 36 clock hours I was on the air.

I worked a LOT of 2x3 US call signs this weekend, many with the more recently issued prefixes like KI4. Too many were not using phonetics yet, but it was great to hear new call signs on the air, and I hope they decide to try other phone contests, too.

Contest Logging was done with TR LOG contest logging software. The following reports and log were created using TR LOG's post-contest processor.

• Rate Sheet
• QSOs Worked by Continent
• CBS report
• Multiplier Distribution
• The Contest Log