[LCC] FQP - What a blast!

[Ted Saba]

Hi all:

This past weekend I helped Chuck, NO5W, operate the Florida QSO Party.. 
What a blast it is.. If you like as close to a
never ending pileup for 20 hours, this must be it.  It is like being 
FT5ZM on Amsterdam Island for a while.

I operated for about 9 hours and Chuck did 11 hours and I'm glad he took 
the last 5 hours.. If you read the comments
on 3830 Scores about the FQP, you'll see several guys comment on how big 
the pileup was towards the end of our
route.  In fact, I had to pull over for about 25 minutes so that Chuck 
could get it under control before we drove
into another county.

The average speed was about 30-35 WPM and at times, guys would call you 
at 40+ WPM.. It was all you could do to
type in 4-5 characters and by that time, they were calling you a second 
time if you had not yet responded!

We logged over 2250 Q's in 20 hours, which may not sound all that great 
on average, but consider that as soon as
you crossed into a new county, the pileup begins anew - and if you are 
not in that county very long - the pileup starts
all over again.. I bet the average QSO rate for the last 3-4 hours 
averaged close to 150... It was amazing and now that
it is over, I'm ready to do it again.. It can be addictive...

Fingers crossed, I hope we did well enough to win our category.. Dallas 
and Chuck won it last year and this year we had
a similar raw score.  15M was terrible - 1Q - and we didn't even use 
10M.  We did a little on 40M, so the workhorse band
was 20M.

Thanks to Mark, K5ER and to anyone else who worked us..

73,
Ted KN5O