One of my favourite contests. Maybe because it is so different. Band full of small signals, not easy QSOing. Very relaxed and friendly atmosphere, with a lot of 73's 72's, a lot of familiar callsigns. I somehow allways mentally compare this contest with some EME contest. Having only 40m antenna I knew that I have no chance to make a good contest result, but it was a great opportunity to try milliwatting again. I set up power safely into VLP zone to 960 mW, and decided to see what could be done. My main interest was to see how strong will be other QRP stations at my location. I know that I can easy work all Europe with that power level in any big contest, but here - most of the crowd will be QRP people, with small antennas, not many of them in quiet contest locations.

Contest started with easy QSO with OK1HCG, and then I called ON6QS - he is a great milliwatter, but he cannot get me. It seems that I am not the only one with a noisy location.

Everything is happening around QRP frequency at 7.030, a lot of signals inside my 400 Hz passband, with easy tempo, but I canot make any QSO. Finally DL2NBY, and DL7UMK, very nice and friendly contest QSO's. Looks like the band is opening for me, and I manage to make 10 QSO's in first hour of operation. In the begining of the next hour propagations are even better, I can hear much more signals, but still not easy to make a contact. Another great QSO with DF2GN in extremely strong QRM, but he got me. And then another surprise - SP9KRT. This callsign is so familiar to me, 20 years ago I worked almost every big VHF contest as a member of YU4AVW/4 team, and SP9KRT often was our best contest DX.

Another great QSO with DL3LQM. Ge gave me RST 229, it was 3 minutes long QSO, but we managed to complete. At 14:59 I heard HB9DAX. I work him in almost every QRP contest, but this time it was not an easy QSO. Deeply in QRM and QSB, with a very high noise level we finally sucedded.

I can see dark blue cloud full of electricity on the west, and the noise level is increasing.

Anyway, DK9PS got me easy, very good RX on his side.

I decided to start calling CQ, but no luck for me. I worked IT9LNH easy, and try to CQ again, and this time DF8TY and DF3OL responded.

The strongest station was YL2CV. Vlad was simply booming here, and it was easy contact, with UR VLP VY GOOD 73 72 tit tit at his end as a desert.

I managed to work RA6CT and DL6WT in very poor conditions, with extremely strong QRN, and finally decided to make a break.

The last contest QSO was F5VBT, and then I heard IT9ULN. I knew he is not in the contest, but could not resist to call him just once. He got me, and it was very nice QRQ chat for a couple of minutes. Angelo was amased to find that my power was less than 1W.

I have spend about 2 hours in this nice contest, and worked 21 QSO's. Next time I will try to manage to work all bands, and maybe make some good result. The main difficulty for me in a QRP contest is my location with a very high noise level (a lot of ADSL's around, noisy TV sets, regulated halogen lights etc.). For big WW contest it is not a problem, but for QRP contest portable location is a highly prefferable.

I hope to see you next time, 73, 72 and sometimes even 71,

Jovan T93W