LIDS Sweepstakes

Sunday night brought down the curtain on another year of November madness. No, not Black Friday, that's still to come - Sweepstakes. This year's phone Sweepstakes was certainly a fun ride and it looks like many records will be broken.

All, however, was not easy going. The Lost Island DX Society's resident phone expert, Rusty Key, suffered a severe burn to his tongue Saturday morning while having his morning coffee. As a result, Rusty's speech was severely impaired. Of course, he had not previously prepared the wav files for his voice keyer, so Rusty was forced to spend the weekend calling ,"Theee Coooo Thweeeeppp Thaaaks, Theee Coooo Thweeeppp Thaaaks." That made getting a run going very difficult, which forced Rusty to spend most of the contest in search-and-pounce mode.

But even that was an exercise in frustration. Many (most?) ops had trouble translating exchanges like "Numma Freee Freee Thiickks Bwaah-wo" which resulted in lots of requests for repeats. It appears that some Sweepstakes operators have a cruel streak in them as some of the repeated requests for repeats were accompanied by audible snickers.

This obviously made for a difficult contest. That frustration was the likely source of Rusty's mistake on Sunday when, while trying to swing the beam between NWT and VI for the multipliers, he went past the rotor stops and destroyed the rotor. Rusty's beam is now orientated perfectly for working HC8 next weekend, but probably no where else.

But all was not lost. Even with a broken rotor, Rusty managed to work all the sections for the treasured Clean Sweep. Overjoyed at his achievement, Rusty couldn't suppress himself from keying up the LIDS repeater and announcing, "Tweepp, Tweepp, I gahed a keen tweepp!" Congratulations, Rusty.