I ended up being busier than originally anticipated and was only able to operate in Museum Ships Weekend for a few hours Saturday afternoon.
I started off with doing some logging. Band conditions on 20m were pretty crummy and there wasn’t a whole lot of activity we could hear, but we managed to hunt down about 6 other museum ships.
Then it was my turn on the radio and managed to nab a couple more museum ships. Found an open frequency to start calling on, made a few contacts into the Midwest and Northeast. Then a pileup happened and I was working stations as far as CA, and even a few DX stations (Austria, Belgium, and Italy). That lasted about 30 minutes, and then as quickly as the band opened, it shut down again. Towards the end, static crashes from thunderstorms rolling in from the west obliterated any signals we could make out on 20m.
I decided to call it a day around 6PM and turned things over to the evening crew, but I’m not sure they were able to dig up much more activity even after the thunderstorms went by.
There were about 48 contacts, including 10 museum ships (I think) by the time I left. I’ll find out later how the rest of the weekend went.
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I got to the club room at 0800 Sunday and started calling CQ. Got reports of RF on my audio and changed radios. Got more reports of the same (but not as bad); dropped the mic gain down so there was no ALC and got good reports afterwards.
Worked as NT4HI/Laffey for about two and a half hours then took a lunch break. KG4GEK and N8BKN were onboard taking logger and operator duties. We fought for every contact on 40m, and 20m QSB made those a challenge to complete.
After a quick lunch break we came up as NJ4DU/Clamagore, mostly on 20m with occasional attempts on 40m. Every time we were spotted we got a mini-pileup, but they faded with the band. After about two hours we got about 120 Qs, just like we did with Laffey. Greg and Rick took off for the Hamfest meeting and I made a lame attempt to work some ships then shut down and visited the N4HLH/Hunley station on the way home.
I think we have six or seven other ships worked between the Clamagore and Laffey, but we gave over 200 operators NT4HI or NJ4DU in their logs, which is what it’s all about.