CQ WORLD WIDE DX CONTEST -- 1996
Call: K6LA Zone: 3, U. S.
Mode: CW Category: SOHP, unassisted
BAND QSO QSO PTS PTS/QSO ZONES COUNTRIES
160 10 18 1.80 5 4
80 83 200 2.41 22 36
40 676 1831 2.71 33 79
20 712 1909 2.68 33 87
15 149 358 2.40 24 54
10 28 43 1.54 11 12
---------------------------------------------------
Totals 1658 4359 2.63 128 272 => 1,743,600
44 hours
Equipment Description:
TS-950SD, TS-950SDX, Alpha 87A, Dentron MLA 2500
DuneStar Bandpass Filters, TopTen Automatic Stub Selection Boxes
and Band Decoders, DuneStar antenna phasing boxes for stacks.
160 Meters: 1/4 wave balloon vertical (stuck in a tree at about
the 40 foot level for a few feet,) 250' beverage at
105 degrees.
80 Meters: Force 12 EF180S rotating dipole @ 77'
40 Meters: Force 12 EF340 3 element monobander @ 72'
20 Meters: Force 12 EF420 4 element monobanders stacked at 85'/53'
15/10 Meters: Force 12 EF515/410 5 element on 15 / 4 element on 10
interlaced on one boom, stacked at 53'/33'
Comments:
One of the highlights of my contesting career occured Saturday
morning, just before sunrise. On the second radio, at 1415, I
heard EU2LCU on 20. I didn't know if I would hear much Europe,
this being the bottom of the sunspot cycle, so I broke a good JA
run on 40 and started S&Ping at the top of 20. After 5 QSOs, I
hit solid RTTY and spun the dial down to 14.000 to start S&Ping
up the band. To my surprise, as I started tuning up the band, I
found no one was there. No one in the band edge? So I hit F1, to
CQ, once. Which at 1423 was answered by DF4SA which began a 130
QSO European run. The last 10 rate hit 113 and last 100 hit 84.
That might not seem like a great rate to East Coasters, but for
an hour and three-quarters, with a snappy new 1X2 call, using
stacked monobanders for the first time in a DX contest, I felt
like I was KING OF 20 METERS, RUNNING EUROPE IN THE BAND EDGE. I
even had the thrill of successfully repelling on outside in
squeeze manuver by a certain W2 who tried to slowly creep down
on me every few CQs.
Overall, except for 160, where I expected to do much better with
the balloon vertical and short beverage, I thought propagation
was surprisingly good. The only doldrums for me were 02 - 03
Sunday morning. Maybe it was being in the chair over 26 hours
straight, but all of a sudden there seemed to be a paucity of
signals. After not working a station for 1/2 hour, I took a 1/2
hour break, came back for 10 minutes, heard nothing new and
decided to take a nap. I woke up after about 2 1/2 hours off,
before the alarm, and 40 was hopping again. Taking that nap
helped me avoid undulating carpet pattern and wavy rig display
syndrome Sunday afternoon.
I never heard zones 21, 22, 23, 37, or 39 on any band. I heard a
/MM station in zone 34 on 40, but it was the only zone I heard I
wasn't able to work. I'd like to hear from other zone 3 stations
to hear who, when and where they picked up those zones.
For the first time I used Miniprop Plus on a second computer and
found it valuable and fun to keep the auto updating freqency map
display in view. It updates every 5 minutes and displays a
rectagular world map, broken into over 700 rectangles, centered
on the station location, color coded to show the highest usable
frequency under the MUF. I think the CAPMAN projections may have
been somewhat more accurate, but it is really neat to watch the
Miniprop display as the color coded areas move. I probably can
play with the options in Miniprop Plus to get its projections to
match CAPMAN. The minimum radiation angle and additive signal
level constants options should do the trick. If anyone has played
with these values, I'd like to get the benefit of your experience.
It seems packet makes a big difference on the west coast. A
packet announcement showed a SOHP Assisted at 4.0 million with
only 1,000 QSOs. I made 1,658 QSOs, but the mults put me at only
1.7 million and I hunted for mults on the second radio a lot.
73. Ken, K6LA - Ken Six Los Angeles, KWIDELITZ@DELPHI.COM
ex-AB6FO
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