CQWW WPX Contest, SSB
Call: WW2DX
Operator(s): WW2DX W2RE K2NG NA2AA
Station: W1/EASTPORT
Class: M/S HP
QTH: ME
Operating Time (hrs): 48
Remote Operation
Summary:
Band QSOs
------------
160:
80: 525
40: 673
20: 2296
15: 107
10:
------------
Total: 3601 Prefixes = 1297 Total Score = 13,661,301
Club: Frankford Radio Club
Comments:
Lets do WPX.
It’s hard to believe that its been close to 3 years since WRTC 2014 and that
was the last time myself and W2RE have operated a contest together. Like all
contests, there is a fury of activity just before the start to make sure
everything is in order for the test. The big issue this time around was
locating the 4O3A lockout box which was found less than 24 hours before the
contest that was buried in a box and collecting dust. After wiring up the foot
switches, testing the station for full operation we were ready to make a go at
it. This is the first time we have tried a full remote M/S event. The location
of the actual operators was at our RHR office in Pawling, NY. The office space
is new, warm and walking distance to most anything we need. W2RE posted on
Facebook Thursday looking for any ops who would like to join our team. Luckily
Noah K2NG and Dave NA2AA both replied and said they could join us!
The setup.
We had two K3/0’s setup in the office, one was the run radio and other was
for chasing mults. Unfortunately, the station in Eastport has been initially
built for DXing so there are no filters installed at the station yet. This
caused a lot of hash on the 2nd radio and removed the ability to use the 2nd
radio on the same band so we were limited to about 5 mults per hour to keep in
with the 10 band change rule. We also had some sort of audio issue on the mult
radio which we ended up solving by replacing the wall wart power supply.
During the battle.
The first night is always a grind. We used the built in score reporting tool in
N1MM+ to post our real time score to cqcontest.net which worked flawlessly. The
first night it was clear everyone was dealing with the same conditions and slow
rates. At 4:45am EST the game changed for us, this is when the first EU contact
was logged on 20m. After that point we were off to the races and rate kept
climbing and we clearly watched our score start to pull away from the rest of
the pack. Miraculously we were able to keep this lead for most of the remainder
of the contest but more on that a little later.
Saturday night we had a great opening to Asia on 20m, really loud JA’s and
another nice run of BY’s, HL’s and YB’s. What a rush it is to see just
about every qso logged show up red in the entry window! Although a nice run to
Asia we logged very little VK/ZL during this time, we even spent some time
becoming directly to the VK/ZL but could not stir up any takers. The only
station problem we had all weekend happened around 2am Sunday morning the tower
would not rotate CW. We could move CCW and we did a few times in short
increments to see if we could get it to swing back CW but no deal. After trying
everything we could being over 500 miles away we just had to deal with it. The
stacks were pointing to 29deg and we were nervous come the 20m opening. We
feared being that far north and the narrow beam width of the stack would surely
kill our advantage during the 20m opening, we were wrong. We ended up getting a
huge run of asiatic russians with all kinds of unique prefixes which we would
never have worked with the wall of central and southern EU! I guess a blessing
in desguise which worked out for us and we were able to sustain our lead.
Without any explanation we tried the CW direction later in the morning and
things were working as expected. Gremlins. We ended up spending more time on
80m since the band was not as crowded as 40m while still being able to sustain
a EU run. Another nice advantage of being that far north and east.
Station performance.
Operating this station for the past year and it never ceases to impress. You
can listen to EU around the clock on 40m.
https://vimeo.com/210285170
We recently had fiber installed at the site and you would simply never know you
were operating 500 miles away from the transmitters with perfect and flawless
connections, still seems like magic. Sure beats the 18 hour round trip drive!
Some pics of the station and the operators.
https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B0h5ejO17cdIVb
This is going to be close.
Wow, what a rush it was watching the scoreboard! To be honest I thought the
half a million lead was going to be easy to sustain, well it wasn’t. Truth be
told, one of the big advantages we had was 15 meters never really opened. If 15m
opened the numbers would have been much different. The first 45 hours of the
contest everyone was basically on 1 or 2 bands but the last 3 hours more bands
were open and that's when our lead was quickly closing directly in front of us,
every 5 minutes of the refresh the gap was getting closed. The WX3B team did
tremendous job hammering away at the last 3 hours of the test. I bet if we
listened really hard we could hear Jim cracking that whip! Within the last 10
minutes the WX3B team had just edged ahead and we were in adrenaline mode, I
think W2RE lost his voice from the last hour of the contest! It was also great
to see a young M/M team at K1TTT (NE1C) who did a great job!
Finishing up.
Thanks to Noah and Dave for joining us last minute, we enjoyed their company
and their operating skills! Congratulations to all the other operators who
toughed it out over the weekend. I’m proud of all the hams who through the
decades have pushed the envelope further and further in technology. We had four
guys sitting in a warm office in NY playing radio with absolutely no issues
operating a station over 500 miles away just like we were sitting at the
station. Exciting times for the hobby.
73 Lee
WW2DX
W1/Eastport
K3’s + Expert 1/1.3K Amps
10m - 8/8/8
15m - 4/4/4
20m - 4/4/4
40m - 3 elements
80m - 4 Square
160 - Inverted L
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
______________________________________________
3830 mailing list
3830@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/3830
|