No doubt this years test had some very interesting moments. In my case I
did not plan to operate the contest as a competitor. The weather
forecast had impact on my operations due to the fact that my remote
station is all solar power and batteries. An all out effort would put
batteries in a fairly deep discharge state with pending snow and rain
coming overnight on Sunday.
With that in mind I chose to work S&P with emphasis on DX Spot surfing
the waterfall and panadapter for weak ones.
Friday was a drag. As mentioned by Jim it was difficult out west to work
Caribbean stations early in the test due to directional receive antennas
towards Europe. W7 and W6 land is in the perpendicular side null and you
need to have very high power to break through.
After 4 hours of listening only CT9, CR3 and a few Caribbean were logged
to the east DX wise. NO EU or Africans were heard. I decided to get some
sleep. During solar minimum Japan would be first workable just after
midnight time local. Not so in these conditions. I did not work JA until
until about 3 hours before sunrise and then only a few appeared calling
CQ. From 1100UTC until SR at 1422 UTC I had a modest JA opening with HL5
and UA0 thrown in.
Saturday evening started out much the same. Around 0330 UTC I found John
SM5EDX spotted working east coast. I heard and called at 0340. In the
next hour I worked 10 more EU stations, mostly central Europe and then
the band abruptly closed. A few had modest signals but many were just
above the noise. I almost expect a broken call or Q somewhere. Activity
slowed and I again hit the sack to return at 0200 local. I started
looking for JA, VK, KL7 and ZL. I logged my first Sunday morning JA at
1338 UTC. 27 more were in the log after a very quick CQ on my normal
operating frequency the band was essentially closed here at 1423 UTC. It
took a while to work through the pileup as the operators were point and
shoot using DX spots all Zero beat with each other. I never did work VK,
ZL or KL7 many of which I work all year long on 160.
My final comment is activity was down. In a low solar year the band
would be full up to 1900. This year things capped at about 1860 and
there was lots of room in between.
None the less it was fun as the last EU opening from my location was
December 12-13th, 2024.
160m the magic band
73
Bob W7RH
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