IARU HF World Championship
Call: K8CN
Operator(s): K8CN
Station: K8CN
Class: SOABCW QRP
QTH: NH
Operating Time (hrs): 9.5
Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs Zones HQ Mults
-------------------------------------
160:
80: 2 0 1 0
40: 90 0 10 16
20: 169 0 14 10
15: 42 0 6 5
10: 7 0 2 1
-------------------------------------
Total: 310 0 33 33 Total Score = 43,296
Club: Yankee Clipper Contest Club
Comments:
I had not planned to be in this contest due to vacation, but vacation became
'staycation' for medical reasons, and I decided to play radio rather than make
a serious contesting effort. It was just as well: a family commitment on
Saturday afternoon and evening coincided with multiple waves of lightning
storms, and I would have shut down the radio anyway for protection.
Unfortunately, I had to leave with family just as propagation to those 5-point
zones was improving on 20 and 15 meters!
This was one of those contests in which the Low Power versus QRP difference was
readily evident because of impaired propagation. Compared to last year's
effort, I found that even the reliable EU big guns with good ears couldn't hear
me on 20 and 15 meters until just about the time I had to head out with my
family. The only relief from those doldrums was on 40 meters late on Saturday
night after my family outing - it felt like the opening hours from 1200-1400
UTC with only slightly lower rates. More importantly, the EU stations I called
came back on first call. The elevated geomagnetic indices we experienced no
doubt affected propagation adversely, and I felt it!
Although I didn't have much BIC time this year compared with the prior 2 years,
it seems that my mult counts, especially HQ stations, were more than
proportionally down-scaled. The lack of an effective 80 meter antenna, even for
domestic Qs, still plagues me, and an unexplained sleepiness on Saturday
beginning around 1500 UTC added to the propagation misery (or maybe it was just
a correlation **with** the propagation and my steeply declining rates after 1500
UTC when I had worked all the readily available North American stations!).
This was an all S&P effort even though I did call CQ from time to time in
open holes. For me this was a North American contest: only 14% of my Qs were
5-pointers, 27% were 3-pointers, and fully 59% were 1-pointers. I think I'm
going to have to revise my antenna farm plans for the declining solar
cycle......
Thanks for the fun, especially to those who worked hard to pull my signals out
of the noise and static crashes. It's always a joy to work familiar calls from
the Thursday night NCCC sprints as well as other YCCC'ers. I'm still singing
Tim's (KT8K) song, "I Want a Big Tower"
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNWZjzrzgwA), but I'm not sure even that would
have helped in this contest - only a trip to the Dark Side (Low Power category)
would have made much of a difference!
73/72, and thanks for the Qs,
Mike, K8CN
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