[3830] LA8W - CQ WPX CW 1999 - MS

[Bjorn LA4DCA]

                              CQ WPX CW SUMMARY SHEET

    Contest Dates : 29-May-99, 30-May-99

    Callsign Used : LA8W
        Operators : LA4DCA, LA8SDA & LA9HW
         Category : MS
 Default Exchange : 599#            
        Team/Club : Lima Alfa Contest Club

   BAND   Raw QSOs   Valid QSOs   Points   Prefixes  
 _____________________________________________________

   80CW      135         134        292       18 
   40CW      444         438       1233       92 
   20CW     1133        1103       2303      376 
   15CW     1103        1073       2719      318 
   10CW        5           5          5        1 
 _____________________________________________________

 Totals     2820        2753       6552      805 

    Final Score = 5274360 points.


Only a semi-serious effort from us this time. It started off as a serious
effort to break the old LA M/S record at 3,6 mill points (it is our own!).
We all met at the QTH early Friday afternoon to get rigs, computers and
antennas work properly. After fixing some SWR problems with the main
antenna (KT34XA) we started to erect a second beam (TH5), but soon found
that the new rotor was too wide for the mast's top section! So we gave it
up. With only one beam up, we found it hard to run two rigs, and just
skipped it. Used the weekend to do as much as we could with one rig, and
used spare time to plan for this year's main event: CQ WW CW in November.

The contest started of quite slow, rates around 50/60 qso's an hour.
Propagation forecast wasn't too encouraging, with three Coronal Mass
Ejection's expected to hit the Earth during Saturday. The biggest surprise
for the weekend was learning that the K-index was quite low, Boulder said 2
in average. That for sure was not the case for us here in the Auroral
Zone!!! Even though the bands sounded good, with lots of DX, we realized
heavy signal degrations during times. Condx into US and especially Japan
was quite good, but due to the signal degrations we could hardly keep any
frequency. All the time we lost it to a southern European, which obviously
had better condx.

During the whole weekend, the rate meter just passed 100 a few times, but
on the other hand it seemed quite stable. We ended up with an average of 57
q's an hour, and variation was very small. In the same way as we get more
K's than JA's in CQ WW, it is the opposite with summer condx - JA's coming
in almost around the clock on 20m, and also into late afternoon on 15m.

Most enjoyable contest, and really looking forward to CQ WW! And yes, we
ended up with a new LA record.

73 Jan/LA9HW - Olav/LA8SDA - Bjorn/LA4DCA

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