WQ6X Triple-OPs the Winter Field Day Weekend

The 4th weekend in January is another one of those "mixed-bag" radiosport contest periods.  

Because the Winter Field Day (WFD) is a part of this weekend, I wrote a look back on the WFD
event itself.  [CLICK HERE] to read that retrospective.

On the agenda for the weekend was a blend of

• [X] - CQ-160 Cw Contest
• [X] - BARTG RTTY Sprint Contest
• [X] - Winter Field Day (WFD)

The backdrop for these events was a mixture of Space-WX anomalies, not to mention internet dropouts at my Alameda office as well as the Concord location where the contest operations ended on Sat/Sun.

Despite the crippled "TRI-Square antenna array at the Anza location (WA6TQT), running approximately 90-watts made for a reasonably LOUD signal, except the actual direction(s) it was heard was never really known.  The surprise (from the west coast standpoint) was working into the Caribbean and even PY5 / PJ2.

When things finally thinned out (around 09:00z) a sleep break for 4 hours offered one more shot at the newcomers as the daylight slowly swept across the North American continent.  When that was over a brief sleep the found me at the Alameda hospital with members of the Amateur Radio Club
of Alameda (ARCA) as we were given an instructive tour of the K6QLF repeater system atop the
5th floor of the hospital building.

Leaving the club meeting behind a stop was made at the California Historical Radio Society (CHRS) where Deny (AE6Y) was giving a tour of the W6CF amateur radio station.  If you've never been to the CHRS museum, you are TRULY missing out.  How fortunate their museum building as a mere 2-block walk from my Alameda office.

Currently, the only way to run RTTY remotely is from my Alameda office. 
The decision was made to run the WFD GiG (Cw only), throughout Saturday afternoon,
eventually switching over to RTTY for a handful of hours, just enough to say "I Wuz THERE!". 
With that, the plan was to make the journey back to Concord finishing the WFD and 160 contests
from there.

As it turns out, this year's BARTG Sprint was a disastrous disappointment.  At 02:00z, tuning
around 20-meters found the usual RTTY frequency segments to be littered w/non-RTTY signals. 
(It was suggested those were all WFD FT-8 stations - not able to decode FT-8, who knows?) 
Finding no BARTG CQ calls, the move was made down to 40-meters found the same morass
of non-RTTY signals, altho over 40-minutes, 20 BARTG stations were worked amidst the morass
of digital cacophony.  Because I could only run RTTY from my office, once I left there, the BARTG RTTY Sprint was effectively over.

Back in Concord, firing up the CQ-160 contest (05:00z) for a 2nd evening, like BARTG, was largely
a disappointment.  It seemed as if the Eastern half of the continent went to bed early.  And, where were the Canadians?  HuH?  After an hour, there was nothing left - BEDTIME.  While JA stations could be heard (but not worked) on Saturday morning, the band never opened to Asia on Sunday. 
No amount of diddling w/the the Tri-Square directions made any difference.  For all intents and purposes, the Triple-OP weekend was over.

A consistent backdrop for the entire weekend were the Space-WX storms creating rapid fading
and various geomagnetic noise anomalies.  Solar Cycle-25 is FAR from over.

DiD YOU work the above 3 radiosport contests?

Is WQ6X in Your LoG?