CQ 160-Meter Contest, CW
Call: N6WG
Operator(s): N6WG
Station: N6WG
Class: Single Op QRP
QTH: Newark CA
Operating Time (hrs): 25
Summary:
Total: QSOs = 227 State/Prov = 40 Countries = 3 Total Score = 23,564
Club: Northern California Contest Club
Comments:
Hmmm. This is getting to be too much like work. I really had
to bear down on this contest to make a decent score (for me, anyway).
It seemed like I just couldn't get any traction. Lots of stations
and states that I've worked easily in the past were right on the
edge of no contact. With a huge amount of patience on the parts of
the ops on the other end, the QSOs were made. Thank goodness there
are a lot of 160 stations in CA. They were just under 30% of my
total QSOs!
The good news is that I beat last year's score by a big margin,
and that had been my best to that time. This year I scraped up
23,564 points, beating last year's 17,340. I had 10 fewer QSOs,
but 7 more mults and 2 more countries. I'll take a 35% jump up
any day. Another good part is that I did it in fewer hours than
last year. Last year I took 30 hours to get 237 QSOs. This year
I took 25 hours for 227 QSOs. Let's see. That's 7.9 QSO per hour
last year and 9.1 for this year. For 5w on 160m, not bad. DX was
sparse this year, but I did work 3 KH6, 2 JA and 1 KL7.
The star performer in the shack this year was the new tuned
rotating loop. It's mounted on a rotating 20 ft mast outdoors above
my counterpoise. I found in the past that a loop under the counter-
poise doesn't do very well :-)
I had a choice of three receive antennas this year--my original
Flag loop fixed on the east coast, my 40m dipole at 43 feet, and the
new tuned loop. They all had their moments of superiority, but the
tuned loop beat the other antennas most of the time. I could have
worked the contest with it as my only receive antenna. I never did
use the TX vertical as a receiving antenna. I used some attenuators
and homebrew preamps to balance the signal levels from all receiving
antennas so I could switch between them and keep a fairly consistent
level of background noise. The signal levels then determined which
antenna I used at the moment.
Thanks again to all patient ops who struggled to pull me through.
Now it's time to start practicing for the coming Sprint. Hope to
see you all in the Sprint.
73, Bob N6WG
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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