CQ 160-Meter Contest, CW - 2021
Call: K5PI
Operator(s): K5PI
Station: W5KFT
Class: Single Op Assisted HP
QTH: TX
Operating Time (hrs): 27:48
Summary:
Total: QSOs = 1364 State/Prov = 59 Countries = 56 Total Score = 521,180
Club: Central Texas DX and Contest Club
Comments:
40+ years a ham, 20+ years a contester, but this was my first CQ 160. I did my
first Stew Perry last month so I might be coming down with late onset TopBand
Disease"! https://www.kkn.net/n6tr/tbdisease.html
This fall, I replaced the 160 inverted vee at W5KFT with a simple, center fed
sloper at 150' and have really been enjoying it - especially since I put up a
pair of 750' beverages to go with it. And since I had NE and NW RX antennas,
why not put up a pair of VE3DO loops to cover SW and SE? A fella could get
carried away with this. :-)
I spent Friday evening running stateside rate, but chased some packet spots
during the EU sunrise with good results during the 0600 and 0700 hours. I took
a 90 minute nap and came back for the early morning and sunrise , which was a
bit of a dud. 899 X 56 X 37 for the first half with 63 10-point QSOs.
Rate was much lower on Saturday night, so I made several passes to work EU
stations, starting at 0500, when I had an almost unbroken string 70 10-pointers
during the 0500 and 0600 hours with a nice batch in the 0700 hour. After EU
sunrise, I took a 2 1/2 hour nap, I had slow but steady rate to the end --
interspersed with some Q5 JA stations and a handful of other Asians. I finished
with 191 10-pointers.
*Most* of the time, you can judge whether you can work a guy based on how loud
he is to you. This is much less true on 160! There were a number of perfectly
readable stations that had big pileups but just weren't working very many
people. I gave up on several of these and remembered that K5TR told me long ago
that the good RX capabilities on the low bands takes some effort and is arguably
more important. The next project for me is some improved RX antenna switching.
My RCS-8 worked pretty well with the control box mod to allow some two-antenna
combinations. While NE+NW seemed to work pretty well, NE+SE and NW+SW did not.
Can't wait to do this again when there are a bunch of DXpeditions!
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