CQ 160-Meter Contest, CW
Call: ON4UN
Operator(s): ON4UN
Station: ON4UN
Class: Single Op Assisted HP
QTH: Merelbeke
Operating Time (hrs): 24.5
Summary:
Total: QSOs = 1449 State/Prov = 57 Countries = 85 Total Score = 1,378,110
Club: Rhein Ruhr DX Association
Comments:
Just over a month ago I was a week in the hospital for surgery. I now have a
â??bionicâ?? right kneeâ?¦ When the other knee will be done, I will break all
my records in running up and down my towers. Not so difficult for me, even at
my age (I approach 70), as I never climb my towers, I have good friends who
like to do that much more than I do!
Anyhow, the bionic knee surgery which takes a few hours, had left me a bit
â??downâ?? (the 2 hours anesthesia), so I wasnâ??t sure if I was ready for a
real contest. I told the XYL I would â??take it easyâ?? and just have some fun
which means I would not go for a score. After all I had to be in this contest:
it was likely the last year of the present sun spot cycle dip, and I really
wanted to give my new K3 a â??real lifeâ?? test.
To start, not having checked the (new) rules, I came in the shack around
23:45z, in time to find out the contest was almost 2 hours old. Well, that was
not going to make much difference; I was just going for fun anyhow.
I had been following (from a certain distance) the very good propagation that
had been around the last couple of days before the contest, as well as the
quite regular very good openings across the North Pole path to the West Coast,
Alaska and Hawaii in the last several months. Hence I decided I would just try
to work as many North American stations as possible, and forget about other
QSOs (= Europe). After an initial search and pounce session, I settled down on
a clear frequency and started to run: â??TEST ON4UN TEST USAâ??. It took a while
before the Europeans settled for this strange way of operating in this contest,
and I just refused to work European callers and sent â??EU TMRWâ??. They seemed
to accept this and did not cause any trouble. Thank you guys and girls.
It was fun. Conditions were good, but not really super exceptional compared
with what was to follow. Notwithstanding the fact that I was off the air for
one half hour to repair a blown coaxial connector, I had worked 47 North
American States + VE provinces, and even worked 4 stations in California
(K6OYY, W6YI, K6NA and WA5VGI) and one station in Oregon (NK7U) by sunrise. Not
bad at all. My â??North America onlyâ?? strategy yielded me 81% 10 pointers (293
DX stations and only 71 Europeans). A normal ratio would be 30% DX or less. But
of course, I had less total number of QSOs. After the contest I found out that
my good friend and neighbor Mark ON4WW had well over 750 QSOs but only about
150 North American stations worked. As conditions had been pretty good, it
seemed to me that it was better to concentrate on working DX, which means North
America. I reasoned I could always work European stations in the afternoon and
evening, if, of course, these European stations were going to be around.
After about 5 hours of sleep, I came back around 14:00z, two and a half hours
before our sunset. This is the time the band is quiet and you can work some
semi local stations to the East. I worked about 85 stations (only 2 in Asia)
in the next two hours. Conditions seemed poor, and around 16:00z I quit for
another two hours. I wasnâ??t really in a competitive mood anyhow.
Back around 18:00 z the band was loaded with European signals, but very little
DX from the Far East. Anyhow, I had to work those Europeans I refused to give a
contact before when I was working all the US stations the first night, so â?¦ By
20:00z I had worked 244 European stations and ONLY 15 DX stations. Boy, that was
not very good.
A first pleasant surprise came at 20:04z when KL7HBK was entered in the log
with a genuine 59 signal. Maybe the band would surprise us after all? But it
remained rather quiet, with 290 QSOs in the next four and a half hours (average
1 QSO per minute), with only 39 DX stations. The better QSOs were with VA5DX and
VE6BBP, 15 to 45 minutes before sunset in VE5 and VE6 land. Take this together
with the KL7HBK contact, and maybe we should conclude aurora absorption was way
down. Good!
But I was too optimistic. Around 00:30 z the band seemed to collapse
altogether. Well, why should I do a boring job, I want something exciting. So I
went to bed and put my alarm clock for 05:00z. After all I was not going in for
a score, and just wanted to relax a little.
05:00z: the band still sounds very quiet. I decided to go search and pounce and
see if I could hear some of the stations that were spotted and that I still
needed as a multiplier. Within 40 minutes, I worked 4 new multipliers: MT
(K7BG), OR (K7RAT), WA (K7SS) â?? it took me more than10 minutes to get
Dannyâ??s attention and to break through the US pileup he had - and RI (W1XX),
my last multiplier on the East Coast. That was fun, but everything was still
â??slow motionâ??.
Then, all of a sudden someone switched on the light, or rather the propagation.
Between 06:00z and 07.00z I worked 66 DX stations, of which nearly 20 were on
the West Coast (W6-7 call area). BC (VE7CC) and NV (N6ET) were new multipliers
in that time frame.
This West Coast festival continued in full swing until 08:00z, more than 30
minutes after my local sunrise. It seemed like there came no end to it.
By sunrise I had worked 65 stations in the â??difficultâ?? area near the left
coast (or should I say â??black holeâ?? which also includes Colorado, Wyoming,
Montana, New Mexico, Alberta and Saskatchewan).
CA: 25 stations, AZ: 10, WY: 1, UT: 3, CO: 6, NV: 1, WA: 5, NM: 2, OR: 4, MT:
1
VE7: 2, VE6: 5. Total: total = 65 stations.
It appeared I only missed Idaho. Iâ??d never done so well with the multipliers
in the 160m CW contest, and this was a â??just for funâ??, a â??relaxedâ??
contestâ?¦
By sunrise I had 493 DX QSOs in the log, vs. 624 European contacts, that is
still a pretty good ratio, I think (44% DX, 56 % â??localâ??).
Off to bed for a couple of hours. Before starting the late afternoon and
evening session on Sunday, I took a look at the rules and the previous records
on http://www.cq160.com/records.htm. Thatâ??s when I realized I set a European
Multi record two years ago with 1.3 Mi points. I was not really multi-operator
(being all by myself), but using the DX-cluster, I realized I now fitted in the
new â??single operator assisted classâ?? category. I also realized I could do 30
hours, and at this time I had only put in 18 hours and 40 minutes, and the
contest would take only a little over 6 hours to the end. At best I could end
up with less than 25 hours on the air. But why care, this was only a relaxed,
just for the fun contest.
No, there were no further surprises in this contest. It was not a full time
miracle contest. It is true the conditions to the West coast, especially
between 06:00 and 08:00 and Sunday were short of miraculous (the best I have
ever seen in 21 years on top band), but it was another story to the East. All
together I worked only TWO JA stations (JH4UYB and JA3YBK). I heard others
(JA7NI was 59), but trying to work them was too slow, and in the time I spent
working one JA I could work more than 2 European stations, so I did not really
try hard. The last two country multipliers in this contest were YE1ZAT and
UK9AA (nrs 84 and 85).
By 22:00z it appeared that my relaxed and just for the fun contest weekend with
less than 25 hours on the air, had yielded me a better score (5% higher) than my
2 year old multi-operator European record. With 1449 QSOs, 57 state + province
multipliers and 85 country multipliers, the score is 1,378,110 points.
Maybe I should have participated in a more competitive mood, and have slept a
little less (I missed over 5 hours of opening time to the US! â?? lazy John -)?
The main thing is that I had fun, I enjoyed myself, and I got a kick out of it.
Bad experiences in the contest? Yes, a few. Too many operators, when leaving
their run frequency to go and shoot for a multiplier somewhere off there run
frequency, think they â??ownâ?? that frequency, and come back after minutes and
claim itâ??s theirs. It happened to me twice that, during an S&P session I found
a very clean frequency. In such a case I always send â??QRL?â?? and after 2
seconds â??QRL?â?? again. Then I send my call just once, and if still no
reaction, the frequency is mine. I call CQ contest, work 2 or 3 stations, and
all of a sudden the previous â??ownerâ?? is back doing as if nothing happened.
He went on a chase or for a pee, but as we say in French â??qui va à la
chasse, perd sa placeâ?? (who goes for a hunt looses his frequency). It
happened to me with UA6LV and SP3BQ, who both would not listen to reason, and
in an aggressive way persisted in reclaiming their old frequency. Something
should be done about this very unethical behavior.
Another negative point is the fact that there are still too many signals with
very bad key clicks, and some with very noisy sidebands. Some of those horrible
signals are coming from famous calls. I worked two stations that sounded like
spark transmitters, I could not really tell their transmit frequency and gave
them both a 591 14 report. I hope they understood.
I have a suggestion. The organizer of this contest should think of setting up a
SDR receiver that records the â??entireâ?? 160m band (say 1.8 to 1.9 MHz) in
e.g. 3 or 4 different places (Europe, Japan, USA left coast and USA right
coast).
Participants who feel stations are transmitting with very bad quality signals
(clicks, noise sidebands) should be reported with details (time, frequency) and
a contest committee could use the band recording to check these complaints, and
in case they are found to be correct, apply some kind of penalty to those
stations. The available technology makes it possible to make such recordings,
and using these as explained would be helpful in putting some gentle pressure
on the contest participants to transmit with clean (state of the art) signals
so that they operate and behave in an more ethical way.
The extraordinary conditions from 06:00z to 08:00z on Sunday morning have
pressed me to write this little story. So I would not forget.
The K3 performed flawlessly; too bad it cannot yet eliminate the bad key clicks
from some stations (DR1- was the champion in the key click categoryâ?¦).
And also, so I could thank all the stations who gave me a call and the points.
I also would like to apologize to those I did not copy well enough for a QSO. I
will try to do better a next time.
A special tribute goes to the stations on or near the difficult left coast of
the USA I could work:
CA: K6OYY, W6YI, K6NA, WA5VGI, NI6T, N6RO, SD6C, W6OAT, K6TA, K6XV, W7DR, K6AM,
W6QUV, AC6DD, K6XM, K6ANP, W6SR, N6PE, K9YC, N6JV, N6AA, N5KO, N6RY, N6YEU and
K6YUI (a total of 25)
WA: K7SS, N9ADG/7, K7OX, W7RY and K9JF
OR: NK7U, K7RAT, N6LF and W2VJN
VE7: VE7CC and VE7SV
AZ: K8IA, W9NGA, W7RH, W6XI, WA7NB, N7DD, NQ7R, AC7A, KC7V and AA7A,
UT: W7CT, N7JW and WA7LNW
NV: N6ET
WY: W7ZQ
CO: AA0RS, KV0Q, K9BWI, N0KE, N0RN and K7SCX
MT: K7BS
NM: W6PU and N7KA
VE6:VE6WQ, VE6WZ, VE6SV, VE6RST, VE6BBP
VE5: VE5UF, VA5DX
73,
John, ON4UN
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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