ARRL SSB Sweepstakes 09
My 7 year old daughter Gillian passed her Technician test a few weeks back and made her dad very proud! Her callsign, KF7FVK, was issued just in time for us to work the November 09 ARRL SSB Sweepstakes contest together. We didn’t go into it trying to win any awards, I had the simple goal to have some fun and give her a chance to work some HF. We entered as KB7QOA multi-operator.
We started shortly after the contest started on Saturday afternoon and worked for a couple of hours. We took a long break for dinner and to spend some time with the family, then we worked another couple of hours before bedtime. We had a plumbing issue in the kitchen Sunday morning that I had to take care of, so we didn’t get a chance for more radio time until the evening. We worked another 2 hours up until the contest close at 20:00 local time. Total time worked was 20 minutes shy of 6 hours.
Together we made a total of 40 contacts in 25 sections for a grand total of 2000 points. We worked for about an hour on 20 meters, but the majority of the time was spent on 40 meters. We never did find a section of bandwidth wide enough without QRM to call CQ ourselves, so all of our contacts were made via search and pounce.
Gillian worked the mic about half the time, and got several comments from other operators on how well she was doing. A couple of times her “YL” voice as it is called worked to our advantage, her voice jumped out of the pileup. On the same token there were a couple of times where I had to jump on and clarify the exchange as the receiving operator had a hard time hearing her high voice. To start with I helped guide her through the exchange, but by the end she was able to handle the entire exchange herself.
We had a good time sharing our hobby with each other, she learned a lot about contest operating, and got to make quite a few contacts, even though it was using my call with me acting as control operator. It is something we both will never forget, and she is even more excited now about studying for her General upgrade.
24 November 2009, 20:17
I have to admit, I have no idea what you and Gillian did on this day for this contest. However, that is not the reason for my post back to you. I would like you to know how much I appreciate you, respect you and love you as a wonderful husband to my daughter, father to my grandchildren and a fantastic son in law. All too often we don’t take time to tell each other how important we are. I am taking a moment to tell you how important you are to our family.
I love you Jeremy, Thanks……