The conditions for the January VHF Contest were not particularly good. Six meters never really opened up anywhere. So a major component of my previous scores went missing. I only ended up making 28 QSOs and 9 grids on 50MHz, 144 MHz and 440 MHz.
Despite this, I did work a brand new grid on 6M, bringing my VUCC grid total from here in California to 62. I need 38 more to go for a new award.
One of the things I played with this time around was my station configuration. This should pay some dividends in the future. My radios consists of HF/6M radio (Yaesu FT-911A), 2M multimode radio (Kenwood TR-751A) and an HT (Icom IC-T7A). By reconfiguring things, I could listen to 6M FT8, 2M FM and 2M SSB at the same time. I picked up more than one station I otherwise would have missed out on because of the extra ears I now had.
NJ6E, WB6OWT and K6DJV joined me on on 2M simplex during the Valley of the Moon ARC “VOMARC QSO Party”. I specified a time and frequency for other club members to join in for some quick contacts for those who otherwise were not participating in the contest.
I worked stations on three different summits – K6DJV on Mount Vaca, K6WOO on Vollmer Peak and W6BEZ on Brione Hill all with 2M FM. It seems that VHF contests should make for excellent opportunities to activate peaks. One could easily activate a summit, get a park on the air and submit a contest log, all in one outing!