"I've had worse"

Or how to tell you've had a bad weekend without going into more details. 

I'm sure most people are saying something along the lines of "what??" Let me back up a bit and start over. 

Something I talk regularly about is my ham radio hobby, and the annual VHF contests I play in a few times a year. There are several of these contests over the course of the year, where the goal is to exchange a piece of information, sometimes two small pieces, and call signs, of course. Well, the real goal depends on why you're playing in the contest. If you're trying to win the contest, it's different than if you're trying to contact places you've never confirmed contact with. 

While there are more than these three, the USA's national ham radio organization, the American Radio Relay League, puts on three contests per year, June, September and January - around the second weekend of the month. Without a doubt, I consider the June contest the best of the year; my results have always been worse than June's in the other two. The reason June is better is purely that the radio propagation is regularly among the best of the year. Another group/company - ISTRC it's CQ Magazine - puts on a July contest and that one is also good. 

Long introduction out of the way, the title is my summary of the contest so far. "I've had worse." At 2PM Eastern (1900 UTC), when the contest started, the band was better than usual, with stations in New England coming in strong and steady. As is often the case, the openings weren't to all of New England, but to a small stripe of the grid squares. I clipped this image of the grid squares in the area from a US Map that Icom America gives away at hamfests. 

The exact spots I was hearing varied a bit. Most often I heard the stripe of FN31 and FN41 north to FN35/FN46. At other times I heard FN00 and 01 in western Pennsylvania, and FN13 quite often. In my quest to contact every grid square in the continental US, the four I'm really hoping for in FN are 57 and 65 to 67.

In and out of the shack for a while (making a jar of Mayonnaise to turn into Caesar salad dressing) and a few other things didn't change the overall picture of being open to a few of these grid squares, the squares I could hear just moved down into the SE states, until this evening when the only grids I heard were peninsular Florida. EL96, 97, 98, 99, EL 87, 88, 89, and EM 00, which is as far into the NE of Florida as we can get, and includes some of SE Georgia. 

The contest continues until tomorrow night at 0359Z (which is actually early Monday morning UTC, not Sunday night). That's 10:59 PM Eastern time. I'll keep the station on and keep trying "asbestos" possible.