[3830] NJ2L, SOAB, 1997 CQWW CW (verbose!)
Healy, Rus
RHealy at mdsroc.com
Thu Dec 4 10:00:34 EST 1997
CQ WORLD WIDE DX CONTEST -- 1997
Call: NJ2L Country: United States
Mode: CW Category: SOAB, HP, unassisted
Band QSOs QSO Pts Pts/QSO Zones Countries
160 35 81 2.31 11 24 Inverted L, 550-ft EU
Beverage
80 105 275 2.62 17 59 GP, array, Beverage
40 488 1364 2.80 32 97 40-2CD @96 ft
20 838 2453 2.93 34 98 4-el tribander @103 ft
15 740 2180 2.95 28 82 Tribander, 155CA on EU
@48 ft
10 76 207 2.72 18 46 Tribander
- - ---------------------------------------------------
Totals 2282 6560 2.87 140 406 => 3,581,760
All transmitting antennas except for the 160 inverted L and the 80-meter
GP are on a 103-foot Rohn 25 tower. The tribander is a Mosley TA34.
In the shack: TS-850S, TS-690S, single 3CX800 (40 and 15), SB-220 (80,
20 and 10), 8877 for 160
Breakdowns are at the end of this message.
What a great contest! CQWW always brings out amazing activity and lots
of really interesting multipliers. I quit DXing some years ago, but it
sure is fun to work rare stuff.
The contest actually started for me a good while back. I put up a new
80-meter antenna like K3LR's old 160 antenna. N4ZR has had one up for a
year for 80 with good results, so I wanted to try it--directivity on 80
is a fine thing, but I didn't want to go in for all the grief and cost
of a four-square. This antenna took a while to build, as time is scarce
when you have a five-month-old baby (and all the attendant things) to
keep you busy.
A couple of weeks before the contest, I was discussing strategy with my
buddy and mentor K1TO. As I was musing aloud about the benefits of
adding a 10-meter monobander fixed on the Caribbean, Dan suggested that
it would be even better to stick up a 15-meter beam on Europe at 50 feet
so that I could run Europe and work mults on 10 or 20 with the
tribander. Of course! So I put out the word that I was looking for a
155BA/CA on packet and a couple of places on the Internet, but as of two
weeks before the contest nothing had developed. I found a 155CA in stock
at a dealer and ordered it. It arrived eight days before the contest, so
I put it together that night and, with ground-crew help from KA2RDO, put
the antenna up the Saturday before the contest. From box to tower in
less than 18 hours! It was a beautiful, snowy day of around 30 degrees,
with no wind. What a pleasure the great outdoors can be! I did have to
clear a couple of inches of snow out of my tool bucket when I was done,
but it was no big deal. The 15-meter beam was the single best investment
of time and money that I could have made right now for contest success.
Well, that and the Beverage!
Later that day I strung the long-anticipated Beverage, which uses an ICE
transformer, 700 feet of RG-8X feed line from the shack, and a
termination resistor with a 120-V neon lamp across it to prevent
resistor smokage from big signals. My Autek RF-1 shows an SWR of 1.4:1
or less from 1.5 through at least 20 MHz. The low-band conditions made
the Beverage *great* to have; I even used it for most of my CQing on 40.
The contest started slow by comparison to my expectations. I put up the
boom and reflector of the 40-2CD this summer, so I was expecting a major
improvement over the driven element alone (last year's 40-meter
antenna). That it was, but it did not yield the big runs that I have
grown to expect from my days in New England, where a 100 hour is a poor
start on 40 CW. I spent the evening trying to get a rate going on 80 and
40, and working as much as I could on 160. What an incredible
disappointment 80 and 160 were! I knew the antennas weren't broken,
since the Europeans were CQing in everybody's face, but it didn't make
me any happier. My QSO count was well down from last year on both bands.
I had 92 Qs on 80 the first night, and almost all my European QSOs. The
second night yielded a pathetic 13 Qs.
I opted to get some rest from 0915 to 1045Z, which was almost a mistake
in itself. When I got back to the radio, things were already starting to
happen on 20 to Europe, but the band didn't break loose until 1115. By
1138, I was making three or four Qs per minute. I am always amazed by
how well the tribander works! I spent a fair amount of time throughout
the contest dialing for mults and Qs on the second radio, but the lack
of band-pass filters (or, more correctly, a switching system for the
filters) kept me from making the best use of the second rig. Some
combinations were pretty good; when I transmitted on 15 it caused no
trouble on 20, but 15 hit 10 pretty hard. The 20/40 and 40/80
combinations were also quite troublesome. Something to fix for next
time!
The next three hours produced 475 Qs, mostly on 15, but with a fine
opening hour (12Z) of 121 on 20. The next few hours went quite well on
the upper three bands, although I was suffering mightily for multipliers
on 15. At one point I had about 350 Qs on 15 and only six zones! The
155CA is an excellent EU run antenna, all right!
At the halfway point I had about 1.45 meg, which, by K5ZD's formula,
looked like it would yield a final score of about 3.2 meg. This was well
short of my goal, so I knew I was doing something wrong. Not enough Qs,
and not enough mults!
Saturday night I slept longer. The rate dropped into the gutter at
around 0515Z; I was having such a terrible fight working anything on 80
and 160, calling over and over to work even garden-variety stuff, that I
decided to catch three hours' sleep from 0545 to 0845Z. This would give
me a shot at any opening that I might have missed Friday night during
sleepy time. I think this was the right choice, given how poor
conditions turned out to be (from many other reports) on Saturday night.
To make matters worse at the time, my 160 amplifier was refusing to go
into transmit about 80% of the time--the TR relay contacts are
apparently dirty. Something to fix before the ARRL 160 CW Sweepstakes
this coming weekend!
As sunrise (1230Z) approached, I was long since back on 20, hoping for
another early start that would get me a shot at the QSO totals I knew I
needed. However, the band didn't open until an hour later than Saturday
morning, which made me think that high-band conditions were going to be
worse than Saturday. This left me with a smoking hole in one foot, as
I'll tell you in a bit.
The afternoon was the usual mutliplier-fest. I tried to spend relatively
little time S&Ping, since the score is ruled much more by QSO points
than mults. However, I didn't want to have a lousy multiplier total to
ruminate on for the next 12 months, which helped me balance my strategy.
As evening rolled around, I was on 40 at 2100Z CQing, fighting with some
EU stations for custody of 7020 kHz. My multiplier count was still quite
poor compared even with last year's totals, so by 2250 I decided my time
might be better spent on 20 and 15. I found a few loud JAs on 20 with
the second radio, so I knew that was a good place to start. Once I heard
how good it was, I checked 15 and found it packed with huge JA signals
and lots of great pacific stuff! In the next 66 minutes, I worked 18 new
multipliers, including some excellent stuff--DU, YB, VK8, KH0, BY, 9M2,
etc. Once I had run up 15 and called a bunch of stations, I went back to
20 to make a quick sweep there for all the good stuff on the band. I was
really pleased to be getting through some roaring pileups on both bands
with one or two calls. In the last five minutes of the contest, I found
a quiet spot at 14062 kHz and CQed, where eight JAs answered me. With 30
seconds to go, V8EA called in and I nearly fell out of the chair! Once
we were done, a JA called in for the last QSO in the contest. We
exchanged 73 at 2359:59. I sat back in the chair, looked at the score,
and smiled as wide as I ever have for about five minutes. What a great
contest!
Now for the blunders. I missed several openings, as my breakdown clearly
shows. Although I have taken advantage of the EU sunrise opening on 20
in past contests, the last time I can remember this wonderful
middle-of-the-night experience was in 1990 or so.
This cost me a lot of Qs, but nothing like what blowing the Sunday
morning 10-meter opening did! I didn't get there until 15Z, when things
were really hopping, but the best was over. I was doing so well on 15
that I stuck with that; it was really too busy to look for stuff to work
on 10 (and the interstation interference was a problem also). Not
expecting this excellent opening to Europe because of Saturday's
conditions, I didn't look to 10 before the stuff that I expected to find
there--South America, Africa and the Caribbean--should have made it
worthwhile to hunt the band.
This was a disaster to my score; it cost me at least 250k. So when I got
there I ran up the band like my pants were on fire, calling everything I
could as fast as I could, since I knew that the opening would likely be
over by 16 or 17Z at the latest. The S&P rate was near 70/hour; it was
hard to get through to most stations in one or two calls because the
band was open to such a large area. Every time I found a quiet spot, I'd
drop in and CQ a few times. Not a single answer! So back to S&Ping I
went. After I got through a whole pass across the band (up to about
28080 kHz), I dropped back to the bottom and started combing more
carefully for mults that I missed in my first pass. Sure enough, at
1557Z, the loudest (southernmost) EU stations faded quickly into the
mist. I may have saved a total embarrassment in 10-meter mults, but the
lost QSOs cost me a lot.
A lesser goof, though one that cost me some good multipliers, was
missing the Saturday morning long-path 10-meter Asian opening. I didn't
know to look for it, so I don't feel quite as bad about that one.
The long and the short of it is that I know better now. I will not miss
these openings again. We live and learn. But still--what a great
contest! This year I made a personal-best score by about 900 k, more Qs,
more countries and more zones than I've ever produced in CQWW before. I
am quite pleased, even though the 4-million mark did elude me this time
out.
BREAKDOWN QSO/mults NJ2L CQ WORLD WIDE DX CONTEST Single Operator
HOUR 160 80 40 20 15 10 HR TOT CUM
TOT
0 ..... 3/3 54/35 1/1 ..... ..... 58/39
58/39
1 . 3/3 37/13 . . . 40/16
98/55
2 . 6/6 49/4 . . . 55/10
153/65
3 . 15/13 20/0 . . . 35/13
188/78
4 2/2 7/5 6/1 2/2 . . 17/10
205/88
5 1/1 14/7 1/1 5/4 . . 21/13
226/101
6 3/2 28/7 . . . . 31/9
257/110
7 13/9 3/2 8/0 . . . 24/11
281/121
8 ..... 12/6 9/6 ..... ..... ..... 21/12
302/133
9 . . . . . . .
302/133
10 . . . 4/4 . . 4/4
306/137
11 . . 2/2 57/24 . . 59/26
365/163
12 . . . 121/12 1/1 . 122/13
487/176
13 . . . 1/0 122/28 . 123/28
610/204
14 . . . . 120/8 3/3 123/11
733/215
15 . . . . 104/2 3/3 107/5
840/220
16 ..... ..... ..... 39/2 17/1 12/8 68/11
908/231
17 . . . 100/6 9/7 . 109/13
1017/244
18 . . . 65/3 7/6 . 72/9
1089/253
19 . . . 26/11 8/6 . 34/17
1123/270
20 . . 19/1 . 9/5 7/4 35/10
1158/280
21 . . 54/5 . . . 54/5
1212/285
22 . 1/1 38/5 1/0 . . 40/6
1252/291
23 . . 22/5 21/3 . . 43/8
1295/299
0 ..... 2/2 13/1 4/2 ..... ..... 19/5
1314/304
1 . 2/2 42/0 . . . 44/2
1358/306
2 4/2 2/1 . . . . 6/3
1364/309
3 . . 18/10 . . . 18/10
1382/319
4 9/6 3/1 1/1 1/0 . . 14/8
1396/327
5 2/2 . 3/1 . . . 5/3
1401/330
6 . . . . . . .
1401/330
7 . . . . . . .
1401/330
8 ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... ..... .....
1401/330
9 . 1/1 25/1 1/1 . . 27/3
1428/333
10 1/0 1/1 9/5 2/1 . . 13/7
1441/340
11 . 2/0 1/0 36/1 . . 39/1
1480/341
12 . . . 94/2 1/1 . 95/3
1575/344
13 . . . 29/2 77/4 . 106/6
1681/350
14 . . . . 135/4 . 135/4
1816/354
15 . . . 2/1 27/0 39/23 68/24
1884/378
16 ..... ..... ..... 15/0 49/0 2/2 66/2
1950/380
17 . . . 96/1 1/1 . 97/2
2047/382
18 . . . 33/0 6/4 9/4 48/8
2095/390
19 . . . 19/7 7/2 1/0 27/9
2122/399
20 . . . 22/1 4/1 . 26/2
2148/401
21 . . 42/3 5/1 . . 47/4
2195/405
22 . . 15/0 2/1 25/4 . 42/5
2237/410
23 . . . 34/10 11/1 . 45/11
2282/421
DAY1 19/14 92/53 319/78 443/72 397/64 25/18 .....
1295/299
DAY2 16/10 13/8 169/22 395/31 343/22 51/29 .
987/122
TOT 35/24 105/61 488/100 838/103 740/86 76/47 .
2282/421
Continent Statistics
NJ2L CQ WORLD WIDE DX CONTEST Single Operator
160 80 40 20 15 10 ALL percent
North America CW 20 32 62 49 32 17 212 9.2
South America CW 2 6 11 10 15 18 62 2.7
Europe CW 11 64 391 666 653 35 1820 79.2
Asia CW 0 0 12 99 32 0 143 6.2
Africa CW 1 2 8 11 9 4 35 1.5
Oceania CW 1 1 5 11 6 2 26 1.1
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