FOC Marathon 2022

This Maraton was great! Thanks to my family I could spend most of the weekend on the air. Unfortunately, no beams here, only multiband vertical at about 28m (84 feet), dipoles for 20/17/15m in the same height and sloper for 80/160m. Pictures are on https://www.hamqth.com/ok2cqr.

My main radio is KX3 with a PA of about 200W but for the 160 and 80m, I have to use a tuner that is not part of the PA, so on 80m only 15W and only about 8W on 160m because the tuner could not tune the antenna properly. Thanks to all who could copy my tiny signal.

It was very nice to make QSO with 15W with Axel in PZ, also Marv N5AW could copy my CQ on 80M with 15W!

On Saturday afternoon local time, there was a nice run from NA on 15M. Many stations with very strong signals.

What a nice surprise was Sunday afternoon on 10M band! The band seems to be empty, I tried to call CQ, only one RBN spot from EU but then suddenly RUN from NA started. The PA gets only about 150W but it worked! After many years I made QSO with NA on this band!

Finally, on Sunday evening I tried to connect to Fabian’s RBN feed and added more stations to the log. My last QSO was with Paul, OZ4UN on 160M.

Marathon ended with 441 QSO in the log plus a few duplicates and non-member QSO. It’s not as many as others have, but I’m happy with it.

Another story is the contest that was on the air with the Marathon. It seems some stations are crazy about 5NN whatever, they can’t live without it. They don’t listen, their ‚brain‘ starts to write when hearing 5NN as the keyword. When I meet these stations outside the contest, I say hello using their name because we already had a bunch of QSO. They reply with GE DR OM, send their name, QTH and 73. What is the difference between them and robots?

My score:

Callsign:	OK2CQR
FOC number:	1935
Section:	QRO Open
QSO Totals

1.8MHz 3.5MHz 7.0MHz 14MHz 21MHz 28MHz
  31     107    98     108  75    22  

Bonuses

5-banders	7	x10	70
6-banders	1	x5	5
Continents	6	x5	30
Entities	43	x2	86
Summary

Total QSOs	441
Total Bonuses	191
FINAL SCORE	632
Continents

Africa	Asia	Europe	N. America	Oceania	S. America

Entities
4X      5B      5Z      CT      DL      EA      EA6     EA8     EI      F       G       
GI      GM      GW      HB      I       KP4     LA      LY      LZ      OE      OH      
OK      OM      ON      OY      OZ      PA      PZ      SM      SP      SV      TF      
TI      UA(AS)  UA(EU)  VE      VK      VU      W       YO      ZL      ZS