3,252,960 points!!!

On February 15th Duane Sandmeyer VE7UF opened his contest station to Rado VA7OO, Nedo VA7AO, and Gabor VE7JH (an IslandHF member). They were on a mission. Read how they accomplished it. Congratulations to Duane and his team.

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Big thanks to VE7UF for hosting our motley crew at his superb contest station.
This time almost everything worked as advertised, the biggest problem we had was an intermittent PTT cable that we fixed in 10 minutes. I wish every contest would be this glitch-free.
Our goal was to set a new British Columbia (BC, or VE7-land) M/S record, by beating the current 1.8M points. For this purpose twin brothers Rade and Nedo took the 2 hour ferry ride from the Mainland to our Vancouver Island QTH. Their enthusiasm was contagious and we kept going in very good spirits with our heads and keying speed held high even rates were low and we couldn’t break a pileup.
With the ongoing stormy solar conditions we were quite apprehensive at the start as the bands were very quiet at 2350. But then BOOM, at 0000 the switch was flipped on.
This was our first “real” M/S effort. Took a while to fully take advantage of the 10QSY/hr rule and the bands being in quite good shape hard decisions had to be made to maximize the score. We learnt a lot about strategy, but I think we did very well and by the second day got into a very good rhythm.
Having “butts in chair” ensured a steady stream of QSOs, the worst hour was 18 while coming very close but never actually breaking 100/hr due to a) our location on the world map, b) hunting mults.
Conditions were surprisingly “okay” with the usual caveats that we are all very used to out here in the Pacific North West. This just means that with the exception of AS/OC we just have to wait our turns until the rest of NA station “work the mult” and that those EU openings are short and weak.
Big thanks to our friends in the Land of the Rising Sun with 975 JA QSOs in the log.
With 118 DXCC contacted, we had 30+ QSOs with the following, in decreasing order:
JA, DL, UA3, PY, UA9, I, HA, EA, F, SP, OK, S5, G, YB, KH6, HL.
Great activity from our DX friends and we hope we were able to colour the box next to “BC” on their multiplier table.
We achieved our goal with flying colours and are very satisfied being able to cross the 3M point mark.
73 à tous and hope to see you in 2026!

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