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It was the weekend of the Dutch PACC Contest. Me being Dutch I always look out for QSOs with the home land. And since the propagation gods were in an excellent mood the prospects for many QSOs with PA stations were also good.

Unfortunately the contest only starts at 1200 UTC on Saturday and just 20 meters was open at that time. I worked two stations in CW and called it a day. On Sunday it wasn’t much better: hardly any signals on 15 meters and then only weak SSB. I heard my old club station PA6A, but they couldn’t hear me. Bummer. But EA8AM from the Canary Islands was coming in 57 a bit higher on the band and I had a chat with him instead. Nice, another new DXCC entry in the log. I did work three PA stations around 0900 UTC then decided to cook dinner instead of spending time behind the radio.

But after dinner I couldn’t resist and tuned the bands again. And whadda you know! At 1130 UTC 15 meters was wide open to Europe and I could work six Dutch stations in CW in a row, before the contest closed at 1200. In total only 11 stations worked, so I won’t get first prize, but satisfying non-the-less.

But the icing on the cake came when I was updating my logbook. I gave my tuning knob a twirl and landed on 14006 kHz where RI1ANT was calling CQ. No problem working him and the third Antarctic QSO in the log. Can it get any better?