[3830] CQWW CW ZM4T(@ZM2M) M/S HP

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                    CQ Worldwide DX Contest, CW

Call: ZM4T
Operator(s): ZL3IO DL1KWK ZL2IFB
Station: ZM2M

Class: M/S HP
QTH: Nr Napier
Operating Time (hrs): 45½

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Zones  Countries
------------------------------
  160:    7     5        5
   80:  143    21       42
   40:  761    24       59
   20:  401    28       64
   15: 2021    27       70
   10:  118    14       14
------------------------------
Total: 3451   119      254  Total Score = 3,774,014

Club: Chiltern DX Club

Comments:

With waning interest in CW, we struggled to field a team in CQ WW CW this year
but Gary ZL2iFB, Holger ZL3IO and friend Frank DL1KWK (on holiday in ZL and, by
pure coincidence you understand, passing through Hawke’s Bay on the last
weekend of November) gave it a go with a semi-casual multi-single entry.

The contest got off to a late start after Gary forgot to bring some essential
leads (doh!).  We went on the air hurriedly at around 00:30z with a promising
run on 15m to kick things off, but then took a couple of hours off to rearrange
the station.  

The first evening and overnight session gave us the chance to catch up a bit
with excellent pileups on 15 and 40m.  10m was open to EU but the 15m piles
were just too much fun to switch over ... with hindsight, we should have made
the most of the opening as 10m barely flickered to life for the remainder of
the weekend.  

Sunday was steady with 15m once again being the main money band. 

The broadband Internet connection dropped out leaving us with no DXcluster
access.  The failure of the PA driver stage in Holger’s K3 left multiplier
hunting rather restricted on a standby rig (though Frank and Holger managed
some 350 QSOs under their own calls on the second radio, just for fun:
there’s no stopping keen contesters!).

The pileups were reasonably well behaved in the main apart from a few
overexcited and basically rude callers calling out of turn and one persistent
lid who did his level best to stop us working what we think was probably R1ANC.
 That would have been a new multiplier, so we were keen not to let it drop. 
Despite being asked at least 3 times to wait, the lid persisted in sending us
both our calls and his report, several times, blatting out the weak station we
were trying to work.  R1ANC(?) gave up, unfortunately, before we completed so
we returned to working the pileup, studiously ignoring the lid who was still
plaintively calling us fully 10 minutes later when he finally seemed to get the
message that we really weren’t going to work him.  

By Sunday evening we realised we had the prospect of a making decent entry
after all, despite the problems, and might even beat last year’s multi-two
score.  At 7pm local and about an hour before sunset, we decided to try 80m as
we had heard ZL8X working US and EU on 80m at that time in the week before the
contest.  Sure enough there were plenty of DX sigs at reasonable strength but
the daylight absorption made it hard going until at 7:15pm the floodgates
opened and we milked the greyline longpath into Europe.

Topband was almost a dead loss: we could hear various Asian stations quite well
around 16:30z but most evidently couldn’t hear us at all.  Maybe the nearby
trees or the steel support cable are absorbing too much of the RF from our wire
vertical?  Or maybe conditions were really as bad as some have said?  Or perhaps
'diode propagation' is normal on 160m and we just lack topband experience (could
be!).

For the final few hours on Monday morning, we kept on pushing right up to the
end, bagging a couple of very welcome double-mults from South America on 10m in
the last half hour.  An hour later, the site was clear and we headed home, tired
but elated after our casual entry turned out to be more fun than we envisaged,
beating our 2009 M/2 entry into the bargain.

73
Gary  ZL2iFB @ ZM4T

PS  More info at www.ZM2M.com


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