My first time in this contest. For many years I have always been away for this weekend. It's memorial day weekend in the USA, and for a long time was the weekend chosen by the company I work for to hold its annual USA sales meeting. This is usually held in a sunny place, some kind of resort in order to make things a bit nicer if possible. At least twice, I was operating from the Bahamas as GM7CXM/C6A while the contest was on, but alas, that was in the days where my CW ability was even less than it is today. The last weekend in May often coincides with my birthday, too!
For the last few years, I've been here, but always doing other things. This year was no exception, sunday was my birthday and saturday we had guests at our villa. But, there were a couple of stations I really wanted to work!
One of them was Dave, AE5XQ. Dave is a friend of mine from the contest club at Torrent, and currently lives and studies in Dallas, TX. He had the opportunity this weekend to operate with his own call from the NR5M station. This is a huge station and I guess a dream for most of us mortals to be able to work from there. I managed to get a QSO with Dave on saturday morning. Here's a photo he sent me of the SO2R station....how many rotator controllers can you count here?!?!?
Next stop was to try and work my friends at the Arizona Outlaws station of K8IA/N7RQ, using the callsign of Mike, KC7V. I was lucky enough to visit a group of the outlaws in a trip to Phoenix some 4 years ago and was wonderfully hosted by Bob K8IA and a great group of contesters from the area. Bob and Sandy run a compact single tower station which does extremely well and at 1902 on saturday, got them in the log too. Here's what the antenna system looks like there:
My morse is pretty terrible, but I did also manage to get contacts from Cuba, England, Italy, Kazakhstan, Jersey, Belgium, New Zealand, Brasil and Hawaii. A laughable effort for a seasoned op, but a good result for me! Thanks to all of those folks who slowed right down to meet my speed, it really is appreciated.
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