As usual I was in the single-operator all-band high-power category
this year, unassisted (no packet or net).
Just prior to the contest I thought I would have rotor problems, as
the Tailtwister on the 10/15/20 meter W6PU quad was beginning to
act up, and while the prop pitch which rotates my 20/80 meter Yagis
was working, the selsyn in the shack had burned up, leaving me with
the fall-back technique of using my watch's second hand to time the
rotor as it went around. Fortunately, KO7V showed up on Wednesday
afternoon and fixed both problems.
That left me with the ice damage to the 80 meter beam's loading
wires, caused by a storm two years ago. We have never been able to
get the beam fully tuned on CW since then, but an antenna tuner
permanently in the line has provided a reasonable fix until we get
more crane time this summer. An ice storm this past December
broke the reflector wires on both my 20 and 10 meter quads, but the
elements are still full length, just not forming closed loops any
more, and the SWR actually seems to have dropped a bit on the CW
ends of both bands, so it was difficult to notice any difference in
performance, except that the occasional wind gust caused temporary
shorting to the 15 meter reflector on 20, which may have generated
some crackling noise on the band for loud stations off the back of
me. At least that's what I noticed on receive.
I had two goals prior to contest time: I had noticed that, in
comparing my results in last year's contest with my competitors, my
QSO total on 40 had been down, so I was determined to make more Q's
on 40 this year. Also, I decided that, based on my observations on
80 in last fall's CQWW CW, I would do less S&P and more running on
80 this year. Both goals were met, but I was still beat by Lew,
N2LT (who I had bested last year), who blew me away on 20, 1400 Q's
for him vs. 1075 for me. In retrospect, my biggest tactical error
during the contest was probably hanging around on 15 Saturday
waiting for a European opening that never happened while 20 was
wide open.
At the PVRC meeting the Monday prior to the contest, I had
predicted that, based on the predictions of the Weather Channel, we
would have beautifully quiet bands on 160 and 80 all weekend
because of predictions of a frigid, dry weekend. I was half right.
Saturday night was beautifully quiet on those bands, but on Friday
night the snowstorm buffeting the East Coast seemed to generate
considerable QRN, though at least it was pretty much out of this
area by contest time and I didn't have any precipitation static on
the antennas. When I mentioned frigid, dry weather at the meeting,
someone mentioned line noise, as they generally go hand in hand.
Indeed, I was bothered by line noise toward Asia on 20 at all times
and gave up trying to run JA's after five minutes of trying
Saturday night because I was obviously being an alligator. Had to
resort to going around the band and S&P'ing the louder ones.
When 15 finally opened to Europe on Sunday line noise also pretty
much kept me from running Europeans. Putting in the noise blanker
yielded a noise keyed by CW which read "CQ TEST de KT3Y" all over
the band. I guess you know who isn't too far away from me and
beams almost right at me when he is beaming on Europe.
Unfortunately my Isle of Man "QRM eliminator" is hard-wired to my
auxiliary R4C which is not a very hot receiver on 15. So my 15
meter efforts toward Europe were largely S&P. At least the line
noise was not much of a factor on 20 when I beamed Europe.
As W3LPL had predicted at the aforementioned PVRC meeting, the
bands showed what it's like to be at the bottom of the sunspot
cycle. A graph in the latest issue of the PVRC Newsletter shows
the cycle bottoming out this year and beginning to head upwards
again by the fall. Let's hope it's right. The cycle always rises
faster than it falls.
Aside from 10 yielding only 11 QSO's in 5 countries for me, 15 was
noticeable for its lack of Europeans on Saturday. Only IQ4A made
it into my log on 15 that day from Europe. Usually we want a low
K-index for contesting, but at this point in the susnpot cycle a
bit of a disturbance can sometimes raise the MUF. Thank goodness
the K index went up to 3 on Sunday morning or we probably wouldn't
have had the European opening that day either.
Forty meters was also affected by the low solar flux numbers, with
paths that we have been accustomed to just not there at times
becuase the MUF for those paths was below 7 MHz. Most noticeable
was the absence of the European sunrise opening this year, and the
lack of a direct polar opening to Japan. The JA's I worked came in
over Hawaii, though NH2G was loud on direct path. As for the
European sunrise opening, I heard W8FJ telling OH0MYF at about 0800
GMT that he was coming in "long path". What was actually
happening, however, was that there was no direct path opening, so
we were getting a Southeast scatter path over Africa into Europe,
much as we are accustomed to with Europe on 20 in the wee hours of
the morning. This phenomenon has now dropped down to 40 meters.
At about this time I ran the beam around from 45 to 180 degrees
while listening to ON4UN and John's signal stayed about the same
strength the whole way. John picked the wrong band to to single
band on this year. On the other hand, 40 was as hot as a pistol
during the mid-afternoon hours, and if you weren't there by 2000Z
you were missing a lot.
Eighty was in good shape, and until the last half hour of the
contest I was in the unusual position of having worked more JA's on
80 than on 20. I was able to find a run frequency low in the band
most of the time when the band was open to Europe, and only had to
give it up on two occasions. Once W9RE fired up just above me and
generated such a huge pile-up of Europeans that some of them
slopped over on "my" frequency and largely prevented the Europeans
from hearing me. Whatever you have on 80, Mike, don't touch it!
The other time was when KC1XX, though he was 3 or 4 KHz away from
me, was putting such a monstrous signal in here that he overloaded
my front end and I had to move further away.
I could hear plenty of Europeans on my transmit antenna on 160 but
I was disappointed at not hearing more multipliers out of Europe.
I didn't do any CQ'ing on 160 for fear of being an alligator. And
how about that booming signal on 160 from KH6CC at sunrise? He
sounded like a W9.
Twenty meters was a good mainstay during the daylight hours but
nothing very surprising happened there. I was surprised to be
called by JA1JKG and JA7YAA at 1800-1815 GMT while running
Europeans. How could the band be open at 3 o'clock in the morning
in Japan when it was so dead over here at that hour?
Last year I had 19 QSO's removed from my log in this contest, and
I know that with ARRL it's mostly getting the exchange wrong so
this year asked for a lot of repeats. For this purpose "NR?" seems
to work better than "PWR?" Since I was being so careful to copy
the exchanges this year, I noticed that an awful ot of people sent
me "599J00". Well, is it "599100" or 599200"? It turned out that
about 90% of the people who sent me "599J00" were really trying to
send "599100", so if you want to avoid asking for repeats that's
the percentage solution.
Anyhow, I thought that, given conditions, it was not so bad to have
2400 QSO's this year compared with 2600 last year, but both N6BV
and N2LT, who I had edged out last year, came in ahead of me this
year, so maybe I did something wrong.
Very 73,
Fred Laun, K3ZO
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