June 2008 VHF QSO Party

This past weekend (14/15 June 2008) was the ARRL June VHF QSO Party. I am not an avid contester, but I did take advantage of the contest to put some logs in the logbook. Due to work and an otherwise busy weekend I was only able to get on the radio for an hour, from 0941 to 1041 local on Sunday Morning (15 June).

Luckily, that hour occured during some outstanding 6 Meter propagation. I worked 20 stations in 11 different states, adding Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Iowa, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, New Hampshire, and New York to the logbook.

That hour of radio also provided me time to play with the DSP on the FT-897 and get some learning experience with it. I mostly used the DSP Noise Reduction to lower background noise and the DSP Notch Filter to cut interference from adjacent frequencies.

Mac McCormick, KF4LMT
kf4lmt@comcast.net