I was actually all set not to do any contesting today. My wife had talked about going canoeing, and I wasn’t really hot on it.

Even so, I strung up the 20m ground plane, just in case. I love this antenna. It’s so simple to build–it’s basically just three pieces of wire (one driven element and two radials) soldered to a Budwig dipole center insulator. Throw a line over a branch about 20 feet up, haul up the driven element, stretch out the two radials and voila, you have an antenna.

It’s a good performer, too. A couple winters ago, it was the only antenna I had up for HF, and I did very well with it.

I’ve been meaning to put it up for a while, but I’ve been making plenty of contacts on 30m and 40m, so it wasn’t a high priority. I finally got around to it this morning, as I thought it might be an asset in working the Fists Sprint this afternoon. My thinking was that I could rack up QSOs on 40m and get on 20 for an hour or so to accumulate multipliers. (Total score = # of QSOs * # of multipliers).

That strategy sort of worked, too. The signals were very strong on 40m, and I made quite a few contacts, but with only a handful of states. The skip was short. I didn’t work any of the East Coast states, for example.

Signals on 20m, on the other hand, were not really that strong, but that’s not a big problem in contests. I worked a bunch of states, and even a couple of G3 stations. Overall, I think I had 21 multipliers. My final score was over 6,500, making it my best Fists Sprint yet.

Prior to the Sprint, I worked a little bit of the PA QSO Party, which started an hour earlier than the Sprint. I made about 30 QSOs in 75 minutes. I almost skipped the Sprint because the PA QP was so much fun, but since 20m was kind of open, I thought the Sprint would be more fun to work.

And besides, the hours for the PA QP are a lot longer. Tomorrow, the hours are from 9 am to 6 pm. So, I’ll work it for a couple more hours tomorrow morning. TOO MUCH FUN!