2009 7QP

The 7^th Area QSO Party  (7QP) is relatively new, but with our past fun in the California QSO Party (CQP), Jim, K6ZH and I decided to try it from his “home” in Goldfield, NV.  We intended to use the tower trailer owned by the Imperial Contest Group and operate as a Multi-Single County Expedition.  We invited our old friend (old, as in a friend for a long time) Bruce, K0YW to operate with us.  Goldfield is in Esmeralda County, which is quite rare for county hunters and in grid square DM17, also quite rare.  Unfortunately, I was unable to get my WSJT station working and 6M never opened up while we were there.

A bit about Goldfield – it was founded after the discovery of gold in the local desert in the late 1800’s and at one time, had a population of well over 10,000.  For all intents, the gold is gone and so are the people.  The current population is about 300 hardy souls.  It truly is a ghost town – here is the Goldfield Hotel:

And here is photo of Bruce with the hotel telephone operator’s switchboard:

You might ask, why does K6ZH have a home in Goldfield, NV?  That is a long story and you can ask him yourself – K6ZH.

Here is a photo of tower trailer arriving at Jim’s vacation villa:

That is Joan, N6KIM and Lori the DX Hound, in the background.  Joan is Jim’s better half (in so many ways…) and she fed us and took care of us through the contest and our visit.  We couldn’t have asked for a better hostess.  Here is Joan protecting us from getting licked to death:

Bruce and I arrived after our long drives – Goldfield is truly in the middle of nowhere and began to set up the trailer:

The final setup was an A4 tribander, a 2 el 40M yagi and an 80M dipole:

We used Jim’s IC746, which we will never use again, and my Alpha 91B amplifier.    Here is Bruce trying to keep me from bettering Jim's high rate:

Bruce, trying to figure out how to use N1MM Logger:

And Jim, generating that high rate:

The contest is fairly short, only 18 hours, all on Saturday.  So Sunday morning, we traveled over to Dusty Fender’s Grill and Fill for breakfast and had our picture enshrined on Dusty’s wall.

After the dust settled, we ended up with 1379 QSOs (631 on CW and 748 on SSB) and 67 multipliers, for a final score of 227,063.  That was good enough for 1^st place, Multi-Single.  Even though we entered as a County Expedition, they sent us the overall Multi-Single award and gave the County Expedition to another group.

Here is the QSL:

Watch out for us next year – along with our CQP dynasty, we may have just started another!