ARRL DX Contest, CW
Call: PJ5W
Operator(s): N5WR K5WE
Station: PJ5W
Class: M/S HP
QTH: St Eustatius
Operating Time (hrs): 48
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
160: 151 39
80: 456 55
40: 744 57
20: 1121 58
15: 1155 58
10: 1567 58
-------------------
Total: 5194 325 Total Score = 5,033,925
Club:
Comments:
This was the third DX trip that my dad and I have taken to the Caribbean, but
the first time we have operated a contest together. We decided to go to St
Eustatius.
Statia, as the locals call it, is a quiet little island only a short 20 minute
flight from St Maarten. It has a rustic feel, not nearly as developed as other
nearby islands, with no stoplights, no luxury resorts, and where the local
people wave when you pass by. Outside of the main town Oranjestad, you are more
likely to have a traffic jam involving passing goats than vehicles.
We rented a villa located on the foothills of the Quill, the dormant volcano on
the island, a place used previously by other DXpeditions to PJ5. The location
was very quiet, with a nice view of the sea to the west/northwest and towards
the northeast. There was a decent sized fenced yard and also a surrounding
clearing, giving us plenty of room for antennas. The weather was excellent,
warm during the afternoons but with a nice breeze blowing most of the time from
the Atlantic, which made it pleasant to sit outside in the shade even in the
afternoon. Brief rain showers blew in almost daily, and lasted 10 or 15 minutes
before ending as abruptly as they started. How nice it was to get away from the
ice and snow and sub-freezing weather we've had at home for months.
Dad arrived a week before me and set up the Hexbeam and got busy working
pileups. I arrived last Monday bringing more gear and our lowband vertical. The
Hex beam was up about 30 feet on a pushup mast and leaned against the house. We
used a trap vertical for 30-160 meters on a 60 foot Spiderbeam fiberglass mast,
with 2 loading wires at the top for 160. We propped the base of the vertical
against a chain link fence post at the edge of the yard, and we laid about 30
radials of various lengths around the antenna in the yard and in an open
clearing just on the other side of the fence. At the feedpoint of the vertical,
just above the chain link fence, was a remote auto tuner.
We had a few equipment issues to work through. We discovered that the AC power
supply for my laptop was causing high RF noise on all bands, and basically made
either station unusable. Luckily we both had Dell laptops so we could share one
power supply, we just had to swap every couple of hours to charge up the other
PC. We also found that my KPA500 amp would occasionally just power off. We
thought it was something to do with the house power voltage, because it only
seemed to happen when the AC was on. We found a long extension cord and used an
outlet from one of the bedrooms and that seemed to help.
Just before the contest I went outside to take a little walk. There was a
clearing beside the yard that we had run about half the radials through. I
noticed that many of radials were not quite as straight as before. Instead of
stretching out neatly, many of them were now kind of bunched up together near
the antenna. A little puzzled by this at first, I quickly figured out what had
happened. On Statia, there are many cows, goats, and chickens which roam free
throughout the island and graze. There was a nice grassy hill near the house,
and the clearing beside our yard was also a popular grazing spot, and I
reasoned that it must have been the cows that had disturbed the radials. As if
to confirm my hunch I noticed one cow who was munching on grass, who looked up
at me as if to say 'so what are you going to do about it?'. She ambled away
slowly - even the livestock seem to move slower in the Caribbean, I guess they
too live on island time - and whatever fraction of dB was lost by the disturbed
radial field I figured it wasn't worth the effort to try to fix it.
We started the contest on 20 meters, and moved slowly down the bands over the
next few hours, and had about 1000 QSOs after the first 6 hours. The pileups
were ok the first night but not nearly as deep though as they had been outside
of the contest when we could work the whole world. Our operating schedule for
the contest was mostly me operating during the night, my dad early in the
morning, and then switching off during the day.
We had planned to have 2 fully functional stations using 2 K3s, the Elecraft
amp, and an ALS-600 amp, hoping that the other guy could tune around for mults.
But one laptop stopped talking to Winkeyer for some reason, and the other
stopped talking to the K3, and occasionally we forgot to swap the power cord
and the laptop would power off when the battery ran out. So in the end we just
used one station.
It might be old news for those who've operated this contest from the Caribbean
many times, but we were a bit surprised by how poor conditions were in the
mornings to NA. Of course we never noticed this before the contest, because we
had huge pileups to EU and JA and other parts of the world, but by late
Saturday morning we were beginning to wonder if we'd picked the wrong contest
to operate from PJ5. In reading some other 3830 reports, it seems that when
conditions are truly outstanding everywhere else, it might actually hurt the
Caribbean in this contest. We had 8 straight hours on Saturday morning of well
below 100 QSOs per hour, including two consecutive hours of 27 QSOs each at 09Z
and 10Z.
But finally towards noon on Saturday things started to pick up. And in the
early afternoon on 10 meters we finally got to experience those famous high
rate hours that this part of the world is famous for. I had a personal best 236
Q-hour on 10 meters, which was easily the highlight of the whole trip for me.
Our vertical seemed to do pretty well on the low bands, despite the cows
messing up the radials. We struggled to hear on 160 with the QRN and I
apologize if we were a bit of an alligator. The second night seemed worse than
the first night, although maybe we'd just already worked all of the really loud
stations that were easy to hear. We missed several mults on 160 that we should
have been able to work. Next time I do this I'll be sure to bring some kind of
receive antenna.
Sunday morning was even slower than Saturday, with 10 straight hours below 100
Qs, with a low of 18 at 08Z. But things picked up again in the afternoon, and
we finished with several good hours on 10, 15, and in the last half hour of the
contest on 20.
Overall we are pleased with the effort - not too bad for simple wire antennas,
and despite the few technical difficulties and the cows. My dad held his own
quite well in the pileups, he's come a long way from our first DX trip 3 years
ago to Bonaire when he did all the logging and CW by hand, he's now quite adept
with N1MM and ready for more, just showing that old dogs and old DXers can learn
new tricks, maybe we'll make a contester out of him after all.
QSLs for PJ5W go to K5WE, any contacts with me outside the contest can go to my
address, but you can combine cards with either of us and we'll answer. Logs will
be uploaded to LOTW soon. Good DX to all. We can't wait to do this again.
73, Erik N5WR
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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