CQWW WPX Contest, CW
Call: NE4AA
Operator(s): K1TO
Station: K1TO
Class: SOAB HP
QTH: FL
Operating Time (hrs): 36
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
Band QSOs
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160: 0
80: 4
40: 893
20: 1301
15: 946
10: 58
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Total: 3202 Prefixes = 840 Total Score = 7,698,600
Club: Florida Contest Group
Comments:
Caught a cold at Dayton, but started feeling better Thursday. Discovered then
that the 20/15 rotor was stuck NE and never did get it fixed. Normally, I'd
estimate that the impact was minimal, but many reported good JA openings on 20,
so I'm sure a bunch of Qs/prefixes were missed.
This was my first intentional full-time SOABHP effort in WPX CW ever. Off-time
strategy is a big key to doing well and I spent a fair bit of time ahead of time
trying to formulate an approach. The unknowns (Keys For Propagation) were: how
good 20M would be after 05Z when Europe disappears on 40M, how bad the
absorption would be at local mid-day, whether Europe activity levels would
sustain themselves enough to make the second night on 40 and the second
afternoon on 20/15 worthwhile, and whether any geomagnetic events would occur.
I guessed mostly correctly on those factors. The local dawn period on Sunday
was really rough here for some reason...
Other than a few brief packet-generated pileups, WPX seems to be mostly a
grind-it-out contest with a finite audience being worked on multiple bands.
Counting a prefix only once effectively eliminates 80 & 160 for us in FL and
that's a good thing during the noisy summer. Actually, our wx was just perfect
for this contest with very little QRN and no threatening storms. Still, it was
hard to pull the Europeans thru on 40M the second night since there was just
enough QRN and QSB. I can't imagine doing this contest seriously on a heavy QRN
weekend.
Even with no storm, we had a momentary power "blip" that caused my shack
computer, possibly the slowest computer in the world, to reboot. G3XTT was kind
enough to stick around for 5 minutes while we chatted during the reboot and I
could finally send his correct number. I'm thinking that a networked laptop
would have come in handy then since its battery would have allowed it to stay
alive.
10 & 15 were better the second day. The southern Europeans started coming
through early on 10 and stayed there most of the day, but I could only get 11 of
them into the log all day! 15M stayed open late, which put a nice topping on
the cake for me. N3BB/NT5C commented on the low signal strengths on 15 and we
had the same thing here. I had the AF Gain almost full at times trying to pull
callsigns out. There was just enough QSB that it often took multiple exchanges
to finally get it right. In fact, I found myself re-sending the number to get
it confirmed many more times than ever before in any other contest.
Plenty of folks copied NE4AA as N4AA or NE3AA (or most commonly as "AA?") the
first time, but I still think the unusual prefix helps draw in the QSOs.
73, Dan, K1TO/NE4AA (borrowed from the Sarasota Emergency Radio Club)
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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