Looking back at PACC 2016.....

After being locked up in my shack for 24hrs, and feeling like total crap afterwards, it's now time, after a good night sleep , to look back at a weekend which usually makes me avoid my shack for the upcoming 3 to 4 weeks.....

I already wrote a post about the preparations not going completely as planned... but ohh well what else could happen.... Well..... I volunteered for being on call for work last week.... cause nothing ever happens....  So 20 minutes be for 12:00 UTC..... yeah you guessed it right... phone call from work....
One of the big systems was down.... So I had to log in remote, and fix it...
As I was still preparing lunch to eat just be for the start of the contest, I had to do that as well...
Total "time-damage" was somewhere between 45 and 60 minutes....

So how about the contest....
Well last years "learning point" was to start off at 10m....
And the conditions looked like this....
I forgot to grab the Saturday and Sunday conditions, but they were fairly the same. 10 meter conditions were not great at all.....
I struggled a lot to get any QSO on 10 meters. Which is a shame as this cost me a lot of multipliers.

Another learning point of last year was to get active at 80 meters.
The conditions were as stated in the chart fair , and even sunday morning I made several QSO's on 80 which I thought was a lot of fun, I even started to call CQ for a bit.
Last year due to my cheap headset, i got a lot of HF feedback in my set causing my ALC to go haywire, but this year i treated myself to a Heil Pro6 Elite....  So this worked absolutly fine! I had loads of fun on 80m

I worked (for me) quite a lot of stations as well on 15meters. This is also a band I enjoy a lot since I started to do the PACC contest. 20meters always has been on of my favorite bands, probably because my antenna (the OUT-250b) works quite well there as well. But!!! I mostly worked everything on my ZS6BKW again. This antenna works so much better , and is so HUGE... it does not fit in my back yard.... (I use part of a field behind my garden as well)

Even though I started out almost an hour later, I was semi pleased with my final score.
235 QSO's , and 60 Multipliers. leading up to 14100 points

This is again a yearly improvement. The results keep getting better.
I can't say I am looking forward to PACC 2017 yet.... This will need a few weeks, but i am sure that next month or so, I will be looking forward to it.
It is great fun, and it is nice to see so much activity in such a small country as the Netherlands.

One thing be for I wrap this post up....
The madness at 40 meters...... Sunday morning 40 meters becomes a too small band. All stations are literally stacked up on each other.... it's total chaos... and total fun...  narrow filters on max, rf gain lower then 60% otherwise you can not hear anything!!!   And exactly at 12:00 UTC..... POOF!!!  Everyone is gone.... and the band is totally cleared ....

So what is there to learn for next year....
The 0 points at 160m is bugging me.... but I have no antenna for 160 meters. Also I have no idea if I can use it in my area. I am in the middle of a big city with a lot of noise on lower bands.
Also I don't know if there is any activity on 160m I would be able to work. Maybe something to look into.

So I had a lot of fun, and I was exhausted! The scores improved again so looking back at this PACC, I can only say that I am happy with how all went.... On to next year and again try to get an improvement!


73's
Alex
PA1SBM

P.s. Would love to see some comments on how your PACC went....