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A Beautiful Sunset |
This was my 22nd consecutive county expedition to Mammoth Lakes in Mono County. I arrived in Mammoth on Sunday night before CQP and spent Monday through Wednesday and part of Thursday putting up my five all wire antennas in the pine trees. The weather was absolutely beautiful during most of the week which made spending so much time outside a more enjoyable undertaking.
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Driving just north of Bishop heading towards Mammoth Lakes on Sunday before CQP |
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Of course it's always nice to share some quality time with the local residents...the normal welcoming comm ittee made an appearance but kept their distance |
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When you plan to spend a whole week's worth of days before during and after CQP, the shopping trip to the market gives you the opportunity to feed yourself with something between fast food and home cooking...just right for my pantry.
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CQP Single Op Cuisine on many Levels |
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Now if I could only pick the Right one at the Right Time |
20M Beam Almost Down at about 5pm Sunday |
Antenna Farm unloaded in the Garage back at the Home QTH |
Even though I was getting good
signal reports during the week, my score this year was down from the prior two
years. And for the first time in 22 years I missed the NT section...sorry to see
that extra-long NT lucky streak come to an end.
I probably spent too much time hanging out on 15 & 20 SSB hoping that an NT
would find me, like they usually do, but I guess my timing was off. It was
fun working all the familiar calls plus 133 DX QSOs (mainly EU).
After the contest ended, the weather was so beautiful it inspired me to get as much done as possible, I got down all of my antennas except for the 40M dipole. So what took 3 days to setup, came down in about 3 hours. But it still took most of Monday to finish packing. About 4pm I stopped by the Mammoth Brewery on my way out-of-town to get my growlers refilled for my family's home coming gifts.
It was nice to have a traditional pre-CQP dinner at the local Chart House with Larry (W7AB) and Don (W7FD) at W6M. They operated from further south in Mono County at Larry's cabin. We first met during CQP 14 years ago. I also had a great lunch and visit with Hank, W6SX and his XYL, Rhonda at their QTH in Mammoth. Maybe a few more contest strategy visits with Hank during the week would have helped get my scores going in the right direction again. It also would have been nice to get some more watts out of my AL80B amp, but running it on 110V, it only wanted to give me about 500 watts on most of the bands.