CQ 160-Meter Contest, CW
Call: G5W
Operator(s): G3BJ
Station: G3BJ
Class: Single Op HP
QTH: Woolston
Operating Time (hrs): 30
Summary:
Total: QSOs = 1264 State/Prov = 40 Countries = 70 Total Score = 817,410
Club: Chiltern DX Club
Comments:
CQ160 CW is over for another year! A few weeks ago, I thought I would be out of
it for this year, as I had an outbreak of powerline noise which proved hard to
locate. But then two weeks ago, just as Ofcom was getting ready to bring in the
hi-tech gear to locate it, it disappeared as suddenly as it appeared, and all is
peace again.
Here at G5W CQ160 CW 2014 was a bit of a curate’s egg. Friday started with
promise, with reasonable openings to JA and the US, and by daylight on the
Saturday, I was feeling quite content with the QSO’s and score �" 10%
ahead of my last year’s world #5 position.
So it was a great disappointment when the Saturday night session failed to
deliver a continuation of that rate. It just felt as if there was a great radio
sponge sitting over Shropshire, and even copying some DL’s was hard work.
Yes, there were some JA’s early on, but most of the night was spent attacking
the f1 key and S&P-ing to try to find mults. Finding the mults was pretty
easy, as they were few and far between, and each was easily identifiable from
the pile of Eu stations on/around the frequency. Working them was a tad more
frustrating, as it became evident that I was not the only one having problems
hearing signals. In fact I felt reasonable happy with the US stations I could
hear, and other Eu’s could evidently not. Apologies to those who found me
causing QRM to their frequency when they were CQing on top of a mult.
Fortunately most understood and then tried to dig deeper to hear the mult for
themselves. I began to despair of getting the US mults until when, at about
05.00, the US propagation changed for the better. But there were still some
seven States and Provinces worked last year, which proved elusive this year.
The only “gotaway” �" heard but not worked - was La. The rest I
simply did not hear, and was left needing Ca, Ms, Wy, Or, La, Mt, Wa, Id, Nv,
Ut, Mn, Sd, Nd, and Ne. For Canada, it was only the Eastern provinces that I
could hear here. Others may have fared better, but for me it was hard work.
The Sunday evening session was curtailed as I had run out of my allocated 30
operating hours, so just under five hours in that session. In the event it was
quite rewarding, with a good opening to JA (nice to have a JA pile-up on 160)
and useful mults from C3, HS, XV and VK.
In the end, there were just 170 US stations in the log (compared with 353 last
year), a total of 40 states and provinces (compared with 48 last year) and only
70 countries (compared to 85). So I am drawn to the conclusion that either
propagation was severely down on 2013, or I have an antenna problem. Or perhaps
the operator is getting too old for this game.
Reflections ? Well firstly, whether because of cluster/skimmer frequency errors
or simply bad operating, I found a lot of callers to be badly off frequency. In
CQ 160, even 100 Hz off channel can make the difference between a QSO and a
failure. Secondly, how I wish folks would only call when they can hear the
station they are calling. There was a pile of blind calling, which added to
pile-up unruliness. It was notable that if I called the rare DX by his call,
everyone jumped in to the frequency and we had a calling-fest. If I just
dropped my call in, everyone was listening hard to see who it was I was calling
(and generally failing). In the end I was very grateful for a short contest call
�" just dropping “G5W” into the brief spell when people were not
calling worked time after time.
No CQ160 would be complete without the annual complaint of clicks. I fail to
see why a particular station (German in thi s case) should make 4 kHz of the
band unusable through sheer selfishness in not cleaning up the clicks. But
there were plenty of others. The other irritations were the “moaning”
carrier left running on my frequency for long periods to jam me. Fortunately it
was not strong, but it was intentional. And finally, in the battle for spectrum,
some of the manners in trying to take over an occupied frequency were beyond
belief. I had a good few “shoot-outs” which I won in every case except one
�" but it is really unnecessary.
Overall, a rather frustrating contest this year �" the score is well down
on last year. I just hope it’s not only me who found things hard going. But
this is one of the great contests of the contest calendar, and despite all the
frustrations, it is one not to be missed.
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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