The Oklahoma QSO Party QRPp Style - March 2003
I did not plan on doing anything of note in the OK QSO party this year. In past years I have found very little activity during the contest. This year I was pleasantly surprised to observe an increase in the number of operations from OK. It started when Bob, N4CD/M out of Texas ran a couple of OK counties on the county hunter net. Well he managed to copy my signal when I was running only 250 mWatts. I moved down a bit and noticed some activity. The first county in the log for the contest was Okmulgee from N5CE/M.
My propagation programs told me I was not likely to make many QSOs at one watt - an I was running half that power. And true to form I believe most guys could not even hear my signal. Many times I could not even get a ? out of the fellow who was running a county. I was just too week. A half a watt from a simple dipole just did not a big signal make. So I would just check the frequencies every now and then. During the daylight hours I stayed on 20 meters. After sunset I moved down to 40 meters. The propagation programs did not promise much better conditions there. I did pick up a couple of QSO on 40, but did not get any new counties.
The final take was 17 QSOs, of which two were duplicates. I did work 13 counties. The odd thing was I never worked two stations in the same county.
I ran this contest under much the same conditions as with the WI and VA QSO parties earlier in the month. I had already worked all the counties in the state QRP. So the goal was to get as many as I could QRPp. While I did get 15 counties the disappointment this time was that I got none of the six counties I have yet to work QRPp. I did hear N5CE/M in Cleveland County. That would have been a new one, but alas he could not hear me.
How the State map was made
Making the map was very simple. I obtained the basic county outline map
from
worldatlas.com
with their permission. I then edit the image by changing the color of the counties I
worked to green. Once that was done, I played an html trick by splitting the image into two parts so that the text would appear to wrap around a single image. The actual coding involves the use of a style sheet so you have to look at both the source code for this page as well as the style sheet to see how the trick was played.
