[3830] CQWW CW WC1M SOAB HP

dick.green at valley.net dick.green at valley.net
Thu Nov 29 20:27:06 EST 2001


                     CQ Worldwide DX Contest, CW
                    
Call: WC1M
Operator(s): 
Station: 

Class: SOAB HP
QTH: NH
Operating Time (hrs): 41
Radios: SO2R

Summary:
 Band     QSOs  Zones  Countries
-------------------------------
  160:     12      6      8
   80:     60     15     37
   40:    416     22     78
   20:    734     32     93
   15:    461     24     85
   10:    556     27     83
-------------------------------
Total:   2239    126    384  =  3,291,030

Club/Team: YCCC

Comments:

Antennas:

160M  -  trapped vee @65'
 80M  -  delta loop @75', trapped vee @65'
 40M  -  full-size 4-square w/260 radials
 20M  -  4-el 30' boom @70', C3E @50'
 15M  -  5-el 24' boom @50', C3E @50'
 10M  -  C3E @50'
 
 580' NE beverage

 All yagis on separate tubular towers

Equipment:

FT-1000D + Alpha 87A, FT-1000MP + Acom 2000A, Writelog, TopTen band decoders 
and switches.

The joke going around is that there are more words in my soapbox comments than 
QSOs in my log. It's true -- I've always been a more prolofic writer than 
contester. I strive to get my QSO count above the word count, but still fall 
short. At least my point total is higher! I do this because I like to go over 
what happened when it's still fresh in my mind. Maybe something I discover this 
time will help my score next time. I also do it in case there are other top ten 
wannabees out there who might benefit from the experience of someone who is 
still learning the game and doesn't have a lot of aluminum high in the sky. 
There: over 120 words and nothing about the contest yet. The word count is now 
closing in on my zone count...

I was going to begin with the "best of times, worst of times" line, but K5ZD 
got there first (kind of like what he does on the radio.) It was truly a Tale 
of Two Contests, in which half the time I felt like a Dickens street urchin and 
the other half I was swimming in riches. It was the most difficult contest I've 
done since getting serious about this in 1997, and was a lot different than I 
expected going into the weekend.

Preparation

I was as well prepared for this contest as I've ever been. Most of the antenna 
work was finished by mid-October. This year's improvements were to replace the 
TH7 with a 4-el 30' 20M monobander (30' boom) and a 5-el 15M monobander (24' 
boom). The 20M is now on the 70' U.S. Tower MA-770MDP rotating tubular crankup 
and the 15M is on a 50' AB-577/GRC guyed portable military surplus mast (I have 
three of them.) I'd planned to put up a 6-el 10M monobander (24' boom) on one 
of the AB-577's but it didn't arrive in time (it was delivered 11/28.) That 
left me with only one 10M antenna -- the C3E. 10M is not the C3E's best band 
and I was concerned because my big 10M runs last year were on the TH-7. 
Pre-contest testing showed that the 20M monobander was definitely superior to 
the C3E, but the 15M monobander was about equal. However, most of the testing 
was on the path to Europe and during the contest I found that the monobanders 
were noticably better on the more distant paths.

I did some easy work on the wire antennas during the two weeks before the 
contest. The beverage had stopped working and I discovered the termination 
resistor had broken in half from the wire tension. I replaced the resistor with 
a commercial termination box. The SWR on the 80M delta loop has always been too 
high for the 87A and has been resonant too high in the band (about 3.6MHz). In 
the past I've found it very difficult to adjust this delta, but I got lucky. My 
first attempt was to add 1.5 feet of wire, which did nothing. Then I added 
three more feet of wire and moved one of the corner points. This time the SWR 
landed exactly where I wanted it. It's hard to explain, but that got me pumped! 
The wire work was wrapped up about 5 days before the contest.

As far as operating practice goes, this was a good fall. I worked both days of 
the CQWW SSB weekend at the KR1G M/S, getting into the swing after the long 
hiatus since IARU in July. We worked a ton of mults in that contest (40 zones 
on 10M!), which was great practice. I also did a full 1200+ QSO effort in ARRL 
SS CW, which is great for knocking the rust off the old CW skills and getting 
used to living without sleep. I deliberately avoided the SS SSB weekend on the 
theory that it's too close to CQWW CW and the sleep was more important (not to 
mention avoiding the inevitable raw throat.)

I planned my meals about a week before the contest and did all the grocery 
shopping by Tuesday of contest week. I've got a list of "stimulating" foods 
derived from an Air Force study -- avocados, chicken, aged meats, aged cheeses, 
yogurt, etc. I decided to eat as light as possible this time in order to avoid 
bloat and minimize eating time (which cuts into operating time even when you 
eat in front of the radio.)

About a week and a half before the contest, I started analyzing scores, 
breakdown sheets and reports from last year. I paid particular attention to 
K5ZD's results. His writeup from last year is one of the best reports I've read 
(besides, he won USA.) It gave me a real sense of what you have to do to find 
the rate and work the most mults. He also documented a number of openings for 
rare mults. It's fun reading, too. I re-read my own report, paying particular 
attention to what I could do better.

Since I had a copy of our log from the KR1G M/S SSB effort, and had my own log 
from last year, I decided to write a little Basic program to analyze when and 
where new zones were worked. K5ZD was kind enough to give me a copy of his log, 
too, which was the most useful of the three. My program produces three reports 
from a Cabrillo file. The first report shows the first station worked in each 
zone on each band and when that station was worked. This is useful for getting 
a sense of what prefixes to look for. The second report shows the bands on 
which each zone was worked during each hour of the contest (0000z-2300z 
combined for the two days.) This is my favorite report -- if it's 0200z, you 
can look at that hour column and see which bands are likely to yield which 
zones. I found the report particularly useful for low-band mults in the wee 
hours and deep Asia on the high bands in the morning and late afternoon. The 
third report has a page for each band showing when each zone was worked on that 
band. This report is in the same format as the propagation prediction sheets 
YCCC distributes to its members each year. I did this one to see how well the 
predictions lined up with actual operation. As expected, there was a high 
degree of correlation. But there were some surprises, too.

All this analysis led to what I think is my best band plan yet. Hour-by-hour it 
shows what band I should be running, what bands I should be S&Ping, where the 
beams should be pointed, and alternates in case certain openings don't 
materialize. Each year this plan gets more and more refined. Unfortunately, 
much of it went out the window this year!

My level of work stress is usually high going into contest week, but this year 
it was substantially lower. I retired as Chairman of our Seattle internet 
voting company at the board meeting in Seattle on November 17. I've done that 
job for three and a half years and it was getting increasingly difficult for me 
to run the board and help the CEO from across the country. It's required about 
30 trips to Seattle and thousands of telephone hours (KR1G can testify about 
the hour-long phone conference I got into at his place during our CQWW SSB M/S 
effort this year!) I was worried about handing over the reins to someone else, 
but my stress level dropped considerably when we snagged my successor -- a 
former vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs, no less (you can read his bio at 
http://www.votehere.com/leadership.html -- click on Board of Directors and Adm. 
Bill Owens.) The transition involved a lot of board politics, which temporarily 
added to the stress, but it was over by 11/17 and I immediately began to feel a 
lot better. I'm still on the Board, and still have to make bi-monthly trips to 
Seattle, but I'll be able to spend a lot more time with my family and hopefully 
find another startup gig closer to home. Bottom line, I was feeling calmer 
going into this year's CQWW CW than at any time since '97.

I made an effort to sleep as much as I could during the entire month of 
November. I tend to stay up late at night working, and frequently live on five 
hours of sleep or less. I was able to force myself to get at least seven hours 
just about every day in November, and in the week leading up to the contest 
slept and napped every chance I got.

Another stress reliever was a mellow Thanksgiving. We do Thanksgiving here at 
least every other year, and I always cook about 90% of the meal. For those of 
you who have never thrown a Thankgiving feast, it can be a high-stress exercise 
in planning, shopping and timing everything to be done at the same time. I 
enjoy it, but it can be exhausting. This year we were supposed to have an 
invitation to someone else's house, but it fell through at the last minute. 
Luckily, my wife arranged for some friends to come over, one of whom is a 
professional chef! We divided the cooking among four people and I ended up only 
having to prepare a couple of items (sausage-cranberry-cornbread stuffing and 
green beans with mushrooms and almonds -- yum.) It was the most mellow 
Thanksgiving at home I've had in a long, long time. 

By the end of Thursday, I was really psyched for the contest. I felt better 
prepared than ever, well rested, and very motivated. I started to feel 
confident that I could do a full 48 hours in the chair, maybe 45 at worst. I 
knew if I could put in that much time, and could take advantage of the analysis 
I had done, I could place significantly higher than last year. So far, so 
good...

Day of the Contest

I slept late on Friday and puttered around for several hours. I was very 
excited about the contest and wanted to get going right away. I knew I wouldn't 
be able to sleep in the afternoon, so I just tried to take it easy. My plan was 
to watch the Nebraska-Colorado game and snooze whenever possible. I'm afraid it 
didn't turn out that way at all.

If there's such a thing as a bad omen, it was that football game. My wife is 
from Omaha, Nebraska, where Husker-mania is a bona fide religion. I was lucky 
enough to marry into the National Championship (my college team was in the 
basement again this year.) My in-laws are die-hard fans -- my otherwise demure 
mother in-law has been known to scream, swear and stamp her feet while watching 
Nebraska football. For those of you who have just arrived from another planet, 
Nebraska was undefeated, number one in the nation going into the game. All I 
can say is that it was the most shocking upset I've ever seen in college 
football. Colorado killed Nebraska - something like 62 to 30. It was all over 
in the first quarter. This just doesn't happen to the Huskers. I had a sense of 
unreality and began to suspect that this bad karma didn't bode well for the 
contest...

Sure enough, a quick check of the latest WWV report showed a flare had occurred 
and the forecast was for a *major* geomagnetic storm. Great. No wonder Nebraska 
lost. I figured it would be more important than ever to get off to a good start 
before conditions fell apart. But that didn't turn out as expected, either.

The Contest

I packed up the cooler and sat down in front of the radio at about T-minus 10 
minutes. Last year I started on 40M with 104 QSOs the first hour, but this year 
I wanted to try 20M. Conditions have been good this fall, especially on 20M, 
and I noticed that K5ZD had a great opening hour on 20M last year. But signal 
levels did not appear to be particularly good on 20M, so I shifted gears and 
started on 40M. I usually like to run near the bottom of the band early in the 
contest, and have never had much trouble finding a spot. But this time there 
wasn't anyplace to squeeze in -- maybe everyone else had decided that 20M 
wasn't a good place to start. It took me until 0001z to nestle into 7042 and 
start calling. After working only three stations in three minutes, two of them 
domestic, I decided to go back down and muscle my way into the bottom of the 
band. I landed at 7010, but only made three QSOs in 4 minutes. I couldn't get 
any rate going.

With only six contacts in the log at 0012z, I was getting desperate. I went to 
14011 and started calling CQ. The rate meter jumped to about 120/hr and I 
finally I got a run going -- almost 15 minutes into the contest. Unfortunately, 
this only lasted about 20 minutes. By 0032z the rate had slowed enough that I 
was hitting 15M hard on the second radio. The 20M rate dropped to 60/hr by 
0104z, so I packed it in and moved back to 40M. I had worked only 75 stations 
in the first hour: 6 on 40M, 56 on 20M and 13 on 15M. That's compared with 104 
in the first hour last year, mostly on 40M. The good news was that I had worked 
55 mults, 14 more than last year.

The rate on 40M during the 0100z hour was disappointing, too. After starting 
off at about 70/hr, the rate dropped steadily. I spent the whole hour on 40M 
and worked only 45 stations. I only worked 5 stations on the second radio (20M 
and 15M), so I think my motivation was starting to flag. I'm a big believer 
that it's important to start off with a bang, and that hadn't happened at all. 
Just the opposite. I was so bummed out by the rate that that I didn't hit the 
second radio hard enough. As the rate got slower and slower, I began to realize 
that I wasn't going to place very high -- I had only 177 Qs after three hours. 
Even if conditions were hurting everyone else, my low antennas and far north 
location were sure to be a liability.

I flirted with the idea of quiting, but just couldn't do it. Instead, I decided 
to focus on working as many mults as possible. This is the weakest part of my 
game, so I figured this year's contest could be a unique opportunity to improve 
my S&P and mult hunting technique. I set the run radio CQing on 40M and hit 20M 
and 80M hard with the second radio. In the 0200z hour I worked 23 running on 
40M, 19 2nd radio contacts on 20M and 9 second radio contacts on 80M. The rate 
picked up in the 0300z hour, and I worked 55 on 40M and 19 second radio 
contacts on 20M. I spent the entire 0400z hour picking up mults on 160M and 
80M. I should have had the run radio going too, but last year I learned that 
you have to work the 160M mults when you hear them, and this takes a lot of 
concentration. It would have been a good decision had the low bands been as 
good as last year, but this time I got only 20 mults that hour -- and only 18 
QSOs. In retrospect, I probably should have been running on 40M at the same 
time.

I spent the 0500z hour running on 20M (41 Qs) and S&Ping 40M and 80M (19 and 3 
Qs, respectively.) By the end of this hour, my increased focus on mults had 
resulted in 51 more than last year. I had made up some QSO ground, too, and was 
only 38 behind last year. I began to think I had a chance to get back in the 
game. Then everything fell apart.

I think it's pretty well documented that the worst effects of the flare hit 
most East Coast stations about this time. During the next seven hours 
(0600z-1200z), I desperately looked for rate and found absolutely nothing. I 
did the best I could with the second radio, but even my mults started falling 
behind last year. The absence of a big EU sunrise opening on 20M really killed 
the comparison with last year. My hourly QSO totals during this period were: 
32, 11, 31, 15, 12, 13, and 29. The worst I'd ever done. 0630z-0730z was the 
low point. Shortly after that, I looked at the rate meter and noticed that 
Writelog was claiming I had taken 47 minutes off. This was wrong because I had 
not left the chair since the start of the contest. A quick check of the log 
showed no contacts from 0639z until 0726z. I had been CQing and tuning the 
whole time, but was so absorbed in what I was doing that I didn't notice I 
hadn't made a contact in 47 minutes! Nothing like that has ever happened to me 
in a contest.

The plan called for me to start checking 20M at about 0900z. There should have 
been at least an hour of good rate on 20M somewhere in the 0900z-1000z period, 
but nothing doing. There should have been about an hour of good rate on 15M at 
1100z or so, but again nothing was happening. I S&Ped as hard as I could on 
160M-20M, but worked only 12 stations in the 1000z hour and 13 stations in the 
1100z hour. This is when the high bands are supposed to take off, and they were 
nearly empty. It was eerie. By 15 minutes into the 1300z hour I decided that 
10M was not going to open either. Working only 111 stations in seven hours had 
left me exhausted and very discouraged. I just had to get away from the radio 
for a while or I felt sure I would quit the contest. I figured the only thing 
to do was get some sleep -- right at what should have been the peak of the day! 
To make matters worse, I had just loaded up on a big mug of coffee in 
anticipation of the morning runs and had trouble sleeping. I snoozed on and off 
for a couple of hours, check the bands at about 1515z (still nothing) and spent 
about an hour and a half eating, visiting with my daughter, and complaining to 
my wife about how bad the conditions were. She gave me a blank stare.

I got back on the radio at about 1630z. It turns out this was about 30-60 
minutes too late. I S&Ped up the 10M band and found W1ECT calling CQ. He lives 
about two miles south of me. I worked him and complained about the conditions. 
He said EU was pretty good right there. I jumped to a clear frequency and got a 
little rate going. The rate was better than it had been in the wee hours, but 
still quite weak: in the next three and a half hours I worked only 141 
stations. W1ECT's rate sheet shows he worked 233 in the same period. The 
difference is that his TH-7 is at 100', while my C3E is at 50'. When conditions 
are this bad, the extra height really counts (and maybe the TH-7 is superior to 
the C3E on 10M.)

I got my best rate of the first day, 66/hr, during the 2000z hour on 20M. After 
that, it was sheer hell for nine hours: 41, 37, 36, 7, 10, 26, 20, 12, and 19. 
That's 208 QSOs in nine hours! The highlight of this period was stumbling 
across a 220 degree skew path to JA on 10M at 0000z. But I only got two QSOs 
out of it. Writelog shows two off periods during this time: about 90 minutes 
from 0015z-0145z, when I wolfed down half a roast chicken, and 60 minutes 
during 0500z. I'm pretty sure I was sleeping during that break -- I decided to 
try sleeping in the chair as a way to avoid oversleeping. It seems to work.

Just after that nap, I got a burst of activity on 40M -- about 100 QSOs in 90 
minutes. Then things fell apart again for about two hours. My log shows that I 
took an hour break at 0900z, worked one station at 0954z, then took another 
hour off. I know I wasn't sleeping. I think I took a shower, ate something, 
came back and checked the radio, then took some more time off. I wasn't tired 
enough to sleep, but was afraid I'd oversleep if I put my head down.

At 1048z I got back on 20M and worked 14 stations plus three new mults on 40M. 
At 1130z I checked 15M and heard some strong signals from EU -- finally. I 
jumped on 15M and racked up 140 Qs in less than 90 minutes. Things were looking 
up! I kept checking 10M and deciding that it wasn't as loud as 15M. By 1300z I 
was hearing EU booming in on 10M and made the shift. I think I could have moved 
about 15 minutes earlier, but the 15M rate was still pretty good.

This is when the other contest started: 9 straight hours of some of the best 
rate I've ever had. I did 810 Qs in the first 24 hours and 1429 in the second 
half. A more dramatic stat is that I had 1104 Qs through the first 36 hours, 
then did 1012 Qs in the next 9 hours. That's the longest sustained period I've 
done averaging 100+ Qs/hr. Peak hour was 144. Not as high as last year (154), 
and the big 3-hour run on 10M was only 384 vs 458 last year. But it just went 
on and on this year, from 10M to 15M to 20M to 40M. I ran up about 420 contacts 
on 10M in 3 hours 45 minutes, then another 225 in 2 hours 15 minutes on 15M. 
Then I had a great run of 256 in two hours 20M (1900z-2000z.) Thanks to K5ZD 
for mentioning the early East Coast opening on 20M in his writeup last year.

I probably could have run more on 20M during the 2100z hour, but I wanted to 
fill in some mults on the high bands and was too tired to run high rate while 
working the second radio. I ended up working 26 mults in two hours, getting 
some much needed double mults from Africa, Oceania, VK/ZL, Alaska, Iceland, 
etc. I spent the last hour running on 20M and 40M, chalking up another 81 Qs. 
That's the highest last-hour rate I've ever had. It would have been higher, but 
I was still scanning for mults on the second radio.

I've never seen such a dramatic turnaround in propagation, from some of the 
worst contest conditions I've experienced to some of the best. Usually 
conditions slowly improve after a big disturbance, but this time they jumped to 
being exceptionally good. I'll remember this for a long time.

Writelog says I worked 39 hours of the contest, but I know it was more than 
that. There was that 47 minute period where I didn't work anything but was 
trying. I think there might have been one or two similar periods. 41-42 hours 
would be more accurate. I'll call it 41.

Last year I dropped a couple of places due to a 7.5% UBN report (up from 4.5% 
in '99.) Despite the bad conditions this year, I had the sense that my copy was 
better. I had spent some time analyzing my UBN report and was more aware of the 
letters I tend to miscopy (u -> a, s -> h, d ->, 7 -> 8 etc.) I asked for more 
confirmations this year. Also, there were fewer runs and most of my mistakes 
happen during runs. I'm optimistic.

I had only one minor equipment failure: the "H" key on my keyboard started 
putting out extra characters, then stopped working. I spent about 20 minutes 
taking the keyboard apart and cleaning the contacts, which fixed the problem. 

As for the other equipment, the more I use the 1000D and 1000MP, the more I'm 
thinking about trading the MP for another 1000D. The MP AGC isn't great in 
pileups, so there's less flexibility -- i.e., the big runs have to be done on 
the 1000D. Although the selectivity and sensitivity are comparable (if 
anything, the MP is better), I just prefer the way the 1000D sounds. The MP is 
a great DX radio, and has great programmability, but I prefer the 1000D for 
contesting. If anyone would like to trade, let me know.

Conclusions

Let me state the obvious: bad conditions suck! For almost two-thirds of the 
contest I struggled to keep going. Many times I thought about quitting. I even 
considered a 20M single band at one point. But I kept going because there's 
always hope and I need practice hunting mults on all the bands. I know I would 
have been disappointed in myself if I'd quit, and from where I sit now I'm glad 
I kept going (like women who give birth, you tend to forget the pain soon after 
the event.) The reward was more than just the great propagation on Sunday.

Unfortunately, I won't be able to put a full effort into ARRL DX CW this year. 
My wife's been dreaming about going to the Olympics since she was a kid, and is 
hell-bent on going to Salt Lake in February. Having no desire to brave the 
crowds (TV is fine by me), and not wanting to spend $5000+ on tickets and 
airfare for me and my 5-year old (that would buy a nice tower...), I've elected 
to stay home and babysit. I'm sure I can get in at least 20 hours, but it 
really hurts to miss an all-out effort in one of the two big CW contests of the 
year. I guess this is going to be a practice year.

Meanwhile, I enjoyed the M/S at KR1G this year and hope to do more contests 
that way. I'd like to do a guest single op, too. If anybody with a mega station 
in New England would like to lend it out for one of the big CW contests next 
year, let me know. Otherwise, I'll have to keep my fingers crossed and hope the 
Admiral makes me rich enough to buy that dream QTH with five 140' towers on top 
of a mountain in Vermont :-)

Thanks for the Q's, zones and mults. No matter what the conditions, there's 
nothing like CQWW CW. See you next time!

73, Dick WC1M


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