This year the Lockyer Valley Amateur Radio Club entered the ARRL 10 Meter Contest to break the current low power VK record.

Like last year, we ran two antennas as Ken had finished his second tower and Alan did not need to bring his mast and tribander.  This saved much time in setting up, as the outdoor work was complete.

The band was in very poor condition indeed - the lack of operators on air was noticeable. SSB was very poor, but good 5 and 9 signals from most CW (morse) stations made CW easy for most of the weekend, although QSB affected signals at times.  We had the VK low power record in the bag by Saturday afternoon, and the Oceania record was now in our sights. Sunday was worse than Saturday's performance and VK4WIL's target was falling way below last years effort.

Sunday night saw 20+ signals from Europe long path and still 5/7 short path. We had beams pointing both directions. South America was worked LP till about 9pm local.  Monday morning local time, was very dissapointing as there were no voice signals to be heard anywhere, so Alan VK4SN, finished off the contest leading the Oceania Low Power record by about 20,000 points.  Hopefully we won't lose too many points and will also have set new records for VK and OC.  We made just over 1000 contacts for the weekend.

SSB operators for the contest were Ken VK4QH, and Peter VK4MN, and Alan VK4SN was the CW op

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Alan VK4SN trying to make as many morse contacts as possible since SSB was poor.

6 element mono-band on 10 meter boom facing USA.

VK4QH's 4 band beam as 2nd antenna.