BMARC Members and Friends:

Museum Ships Weekend

2010 June 5-6 (UTC)

For our tenth annual participation in Museum Ships Weekend we did very well considering that we're still stuck near the bottom of the sunspot cycle, and all of our contacts except locals are at least 2500 miles away. This year we made more contacts than we ever have before. The final totals for 2010 were 967 contacts, all on HF. We worked most states and 25 countries on all continents except Africa. Because of the poor propagation it was nearly a one-band effort - we had 901 contacts on 20 meters using the discone antenna on the bow, and 66 contacts on 17 and 40 meters using the pair of 35-foot whips up on the flying bridge. Our 20 meter results were quite good; what kept us from going well over a thousand contacts was that this year there were no good openings on 17 meters, usually one of our workhorse bands.

As always, many of our contacts were with Navy veterans or others who had special memories of Missouri or Pearl Harbor. Although it wasn't our primary goal, we also worked ten other museum ships: Destroyer Escort USS Stewart, Aircraft Carriers USS Hornet, USS Lexington and USS Midway, Submarines USS Batfish, USS Dolphin and USS Pampanito, RMS Queen Mary, Army Tug Angel's Gate, and Coast Guard Cutter/ex-Presidential Yacht USS Potomac.

Propagation summary (all times UTC):2 PM Friday afternoon (Saturday UTC) the event began, and from 0000Z to 0600Z we had a respectable pileup on 20 meters. Most stations were on the US mainland, but we also had quite a few contacts in Australia and New Zealand, and some in the Caribbean. On Saturday morning we made only about 100 contacts between 1630Z and 0000Z, but they included some Europeans and Saudi Arabia around 1830Z. Saturday afternoon 20 meters opened up again and we had another good run until 0600Z, including more Europeans around 0500-0600Z. On Sunday morning we had some good propagation on 20 early on, and instead of dying out around 1900Z as it usually does, we had a fairly steady flow of contacts until the event end at 2 PM Sunday local time.

Thanks to our operators/loggers/pile-up interpreters for alternately putting up with boredom when the bands were dead and dealing with heavy pile-ups of stations calling when conditions were good. In alphabetical order:

Jim Davis WH6Q

Chuck Epperson AH6SC

Dan Greeson KH6P

Pete Wokoun KH6GRT

[+ KH7JJ]

And special thanks to Mike Weidenbach, our liaison and supervisor on the Missouri Memorial Association staff, who has enthusiastically supported all our efforts in Radio Central.

73 Ned KH7JJ