CQ Worldwide DX Contest, RTTY
Call: V31VP
Operator(s): V31VP
Station: V31DL
Class: SO(A)AB HP
QTH: Belize
Operating Time (hrs): 33:15
Summary:
Band QSOs State/Prov DX Zones
------------------------------------
80: 64 31 9 8
40: 557 55 56 21
20: 813 51 78 27
15: 238 32 48 16
10: 8 0 5 4
------------------------------------
Total: 1680 169 196 169 Total Score = 1,766,646
Club: DFW Contest Group
Comments:
Even though I operated 7 hours longer this year (33h15m) than last year
(26h29m), this years raw score was only 3.8% larger than 2017. That tells you
how band conditions have deteriorated in a years time.
10m was a corpse and 15m was but a shell of its former self. 20m and 40m
carried most of the weight from here in Central America. The only 10m QSOs here
were via TEP to deep SA, although from some of the spots I saw it looked like
guys in the US got a little bit of Es. I never heard any NA on 10m at all.
The 15m opening to EU was short, it appeared to be productive from about
1400-1600 primarily, but with a few QSOs as late as the 18Z hour. 15m in the
afternoon was dead to most of the US in the afternoon, unlike the pipeline it
had been.
The usual 2200-0200Z 20m/15m opening to JA was weak here, only a handful worked
instead of the usual steady stream of JA callers. 20m to EU opened right at
dawn here (1200Z) faded during local noon hours, but came back somewhat a couple
hours after EU sunset.
AF aside from Zone 33 was noticeable by its absence. Saw a ZS spotted on 15m
but couldn't hear him. I managed to get Zone 36 by working UW5EJX/MM on 15m who
presumably was on a freighter somewhere in the south Atlantic off the west coast
of Africa. The path was weak and I turned the amp up to MAX in order to get
him.
Another notable QSO was with the VK9XT Dxpedition in the 00Z hour Sunday on 20m,
which provided Zone 29.
40m was the place to be after 0130Z with lots of EU plus NA.
80m is somewhat noisy down here and the distance from the US means signals on
the V3 to US path aren't that good, (really need a vertical vice inverted Vee)
so my time on 80m was primarily limited to Search and Pounce to scoop up mults.
The only real DX worked on 80 were CR3W, 9A1A & OK2D. It was nice to be
able to work RTTY above 3600 kHz (so as to pick up J35X), but did hear several
US stations working out of band. Some US guys need a reminder that RTTY has not
been legal from the US above 3600 kHz for some years now (sadly) and if the
contest referees on their toes, they'll likely lose those QSOs in log checking.
Had some nice long runs on both 20m and 40m, these will be our mainstays while
we serve our several year prison sentence in the dungeon of the solar cycle
minimum. Maybe we will be granted parole in a few years time.
Sunday afternoon with 5 hours to go in the contest N1MM+ on my laptop froze with
Windows giving me an "N1MM+ is Not Responding" message. Closing down
the program and rebooting the laptop didn't fix it. I then remembered the trick
of replacing the N1MM logger.ini file with one of the 7 back up files N1MM+
stores from previous days (n1mm logger.ini.Friday.bak in my case) and that
worked; of course I had to re-select the correct log in the database, but
disaster was averted with only 20 minutes of down time. I had to do this a 2nd
time an hour or so later, when it froze again but by then I knew what to do and
lost maybe 5 minutes before I was up and running again. (It pays to subscribe to
and read the N1MM+ .io group message board!)
Gear: IC-7300, SPE Expert 1.3k-FA amp, A3S at 63 ft w/40m extension, 40 &
80m inverted Vees, N1MM+ logger with MMTTY and 2 Tone engines.
As always, thanks to Andre (V31DL) for the use of the Maya Hill shack and to his
XYL Monika for her fine hospitality at Maya Hill Lodge. I hope to be back in 3
weeks for the CQ WW SSB contest.
73,
Victor V31VP (WB0TEV)
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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