Well, another ARRL Sweepstakes is in the books, and while I didn’t set any personal bests or come close to a clean sweep, I had fun during the time I had on the air.
In the CW weekend, I made 203 QSOs in 69 sections for 28,000 points in about seven hours in the NF8M shack. Additionally, I put perhaps 50 QSOs in the log at W8SH, my college club at Michigan State University. W8SH made just over 200 QSOs in total.
The phone weekend saw more limited time. I was on for about five hours and made 120 QSOs in 60 sections for 14,400 points.
Propagation was decent both weekends with low A indices and adequate solar flux for this time in the sunspot cycle. As usual, however, Saturday night was a fight because so many stations were on. I decided to give up on a QSO if I couldn’t make it within three or four tries, and that happened a lot on Saturday. On Sunday, however, I had a much easier time because all the big guns had already worked each other and the “fresh meat” could be heard.