WQ6X Helps navigate NX6T's NAQP Navigation

As I write this on Sunday morning, I am bemused by the process of establishing an anchor point around which to write this Blog entry.  A LoT of weird, disconnected occurrences occurred this weekend during this year's 2021 NAQP Cw contest.  To level the playing parameters, NAQP
contests have a 100-w max power limit (anything above that power-level becomes a checklog).

For this weekend's 12-hour GiG, we had plenty of operators for our Multi-2 operation which offered
me a LoT of flexibility in on-the-air time.  My assigned time slots were 21:00z to 23:00z followed by 01:0zz to 03:00z.  At 21:00z, STN-2 was knocking 'em out on 20-meters while N6KI was making a presence on 15-meters.  Literally minutes after my start time, I noticed that the band "seemed to be dead" and the radio was only putting out 25% of its rated 100-watts; a closer look showed the SWR
to be 6.7:1 - some sort of failure seemed to have occurred with the 3-el Stepp-IR antenna.

After 20-minutes of wasted futzing, it was decided to forgo 15-meters and make an early appearance
on 40-meters.  Amazingly the east coast was already coming in; more amazingly, a European callsign (LZ1340B) was also heard in Fallbrook - Huh?  On 40-meters in the early afternoon?  wOw!

In recent months 40-meters has been remaining open later in the morning and opening earlier in the afternoon.  With the remaining 80 minutes of my 2 hour shift I managed 52 QSOs into the 40-meter log while the 20-meter crew kept things alive there.  Coming back at 01:00z 40-meters was WIDE OPEN and the 20-meter crew was already making 80-meters happen.  During the 5 - 7 dinner hour,
I managed 141 QSOs on 40-meters before turning things over to N6CY at 03:00z.

You've heard me talk about the intentional QRM I often encounter on 40-meters; that usually occurs after midnight (08:00z).  For this NAQP gig, other than crowded band segments it was too early for the QRM'ers to get out of bed and get started.  Tuning around 7047.5 (the W1AW Bulletin and Code practice frequency) I was proud to note that NAQP'ers completely avoided that segment; however in place of US, swarms of FT-8 signals riddled the W1AW area.  There is plenty of room on 40-meters for ALL of us to give W1AW an open frequency for transmissions that benefit us all.  Is it REALLY
that difficult to understand?

When it was all over it would seem that NX6T too 10th place overall, 2nd-place for California and 1st-place for San Diego and the Southwest Division; not bad considering what we had to work with.

DiD YOU play in January's NAQP CW contest?

Is NX6T in YOUR LoG?