At 10:55 AM 7/18/2007 -0400, Yuri VE3DZ wrote:
>With all this huge HQ activity, especially from Europe, multipliers hunting
>is not so important anymore.
I worked quite a few of my 80m multipliers while CQing. It seemed that when
their own rates dropped, they went S&Ping for the strongest,
easiest-to-work, whether those were EU or NA or SA. I was even called by
EK0HQ, who wasn't listed in any of the HQ station spreadsheets ;o/
>It's more like WPX Contest now - the more contacts you make, the higher is
>your multiplier total.
That certainly seemed true to me, from Connecticut. Further west in NA,
though, one has to S&P to achieve high mult counts. I remember when I lived
in W6-land, the ONLY way to get mults was to go hunting for them.
>For instance, on 80m CW I heard (loud!) a bunch of multipliers that I
>simply couldn't work - like EM5HQ, LZ7HQ and so on. They just keep on
>answering their EU neighbours and completely ignore weak DX signals...
The ones I couldn't work were generally in the 2nd or even 3rd tier and
even then, when their pileups died down, they were more-often-than-not
workable. Sometimes, it'd take a variety of techniques to get their
attention, such as continually zerobeating whomever they'd just worked, or
waiting until QSB peaked them up high. It seemed to me that I was, myself,
in their own 2nd or 3rd tier and so simply covered up by stronger callers.
Once those had been worked, then they could hear me and responded to my
calls. What was really interesting was that at least a dozen times, they
had trouble copying my call correctly and it would take us several minutes;
several times, almost FIVE minutes. This was in marked contrast to the WW
or ARRL DX tests where a DX station hardly spends more than two or three
go-arounds trying to dig you out before giving up and going back to CQing.
This also happened on 40m but less often. I attribute this to the fact that
I was a 5-pointer in the IARU whereas in the other DX tests, I would be
just another low-point stateside Q.
There was one Scandinavian station who was a solid 2nd-tier strength from
the first time I heard them before 00Z through almost 06Z but who seemed to
have extreme difficulties hearing callers. I managed to work them early-on,
around 01Z, but then completely forgot I'd worked them. When I'd run across
them again, I'd call several times with no reply ;o( I wondered about the
fact that I almost never heard other NAs calling them; I've come across
that before quite often this year where nobody seemed to be calling a
Scandinavian even though they were S5. Eventually, around 0545Z, they
responded with "K0X?" and I entered their callsign into the logger, only to
discover they would be a dupe ;o(((((((
>From the 3830 reports, I now realize the Scandinavians were having trouble
hearing through their aurora ;o(
Yanno, what was REALLY interesting, to me, was the large number of Russians
on 80m that I could hear calling Europeans; the Russians, according to N1MM
Logger's Grayline program, were already several hours PAST their own
sunrise. They were all S&Ping which meant the only time I heard them was
when they were calling whomever I was calling; and so I didn't have a
chance to call and work them. EK0HQ was the lone exception.
The absolute BIGGEST surprise, to me, was hearing 9V1YC CQing on 40m (yes,
FORTY) when I first got on at around 23Z; he was still S5 when he finally
QSYed or QRTed sometime after 00Z. That was the first time I've ever heard
him on 40m. Never did get a rise from him, though ;o(((( (There was one
other SE Asian I could hear on 40m at the same time but way weaker; didn't
even try calling him.)
Steve, K0XP
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