UTARC 1996 CQ World Wide VHF Contest

W5EHM participated in the CQ World-Wide VHF Contest conducted from 1800UTC 13 July 1996 to 2100UTC 14 July 1996. This was the club's first VHF contesting effort in at least seven years. We operated as a single-op station (one operator, Ken Harker N1PVB.) We were active on both six meters (50MHz to 54MHz) and two meters (144MHz to 148MHz).

Band conditions on 6m were VERY poor from our QTH in EM10. We had a few small Sporadic E openings to Arizona and the higher elevations in California on Saturday afternoon and then again on Sunday morning, but with the exception of two stray contacts within the first half hour of the contest, no grids north and east of EM10 were ever heard on 6m. Naturally, with such poor 6m E's, the 2m bands never opened up to outside of Texas. Even so, we worked grids to our west, our southwest, our south, our southeast, and our east, but nothing on 2m to the north or northeast. Because the IARU HF World Championship was also happening on Saturday and our VHF and HF beams are mounted on a common rotor, there may have been small openings we missed, but almost certainly nothing significant.

We had 49 QSOs during the contest, fairly evenly distributed between 6m and 2m. We worked several never-before-contacted grids on both bands. The most impressive contacts were DM63 on 6m (our first New Mexico VHF contact) and EL17 on 6m (our farthest tropo scatter contact on 6m.)

According to club records, this was our highest scoring VHF contest effort to date. The score calculated below is still unofficial.

6m grids worked during the contest (unofficial)

DM05, DM26, DM33, DM34, DM43, DM44, DM45, DM63, EL17, EL18, EL29, EM00, EM10, EM81, EM90

2m grids worked during the contest (unofficial)

DM81, DM91, EL09, EL17, EL18, EL19, EL29, EM00, EM01, EM10