[3830] CQ160 CW W4ZV Single Op HP

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                    CQ 160-Meter Contest, CW

Call: W4ZV
Operator(s): W4ZV
Station: W4ZV

Class: Single Op HP
QTH: NC
Operating Time (hrs): 30

Summary:
Total:  QSOs = 1542  State/Prov = 58  Countries = 68  Total Score = 829,332

Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club

Comments:

I was very lucky to even participate!  Our weather forecast was for an ice storm
to begin Friday evening with widespread power outages predicted, and ice also
detunes my TX antenna badly.  Fortunately the freezing rain moved further south
and we only got ~6" of snow and sleet.  Whew!

Conditions here were good Friday night but not Saturday.  Friday was similar to
last year but on Saturday the storm front created a line of thunderstorms off
the mid-Atlantic coast with greatly increased QRN levels.  Propagation was also
not as good Saturday and I could tell EU stations were not copying me well. 
Even though I had better RX antennas (new EU & JA Beverages plus an RX 4SQ for
diversity), signal strengths were just not the same as last year.  A few
statistics tell the story well:

QSOs     2009     2010

z14       213      189
z15       260      144
z16        64       51
z17         3        1
z18         0        1
z19         0        1
z25        37        8

Total    1651     1542

Multiplier totals were about the same but I missed South Dakota this year. 
However there were bright spots such as 7Q7BP, UN2L and ST2AR all calling me
within ~30 minutes on Saturday night!  :-))

Just a few comments on operating.  I believe top-class rigs like the K3, Orion
and Flex 3k (5k still has a 2.4 kHz spur problem) are allowing stations to
operate much closer together.  Of course we still have the key clicks, phase
noise and bad spurious on some signals (some of which may be intentional).  The
problem I see when trying to use ~300 Hz spacing (instead of 500 Hz) is that too
many stations are calling off-frequency.  Even ~150 Hz off can create problems
when spacing is tight because you'll be outside the bandpass of the station
you're calling and also QRMing an adjacent station.  Hopefully as more rigs
adopt SDR capabilities, we'll see more stations zero-beating more accurately. 
Europeans are much better at this than NA because they've had to live with
tight spacings for many years.  My hope is that as the K3 becomes more popular,
it may also help improve the TX signal quality of many of the trashy signals on
160 now.

Thanks again for the QSOs and my apologies if I was partially deaf Saturday
night.  I felt truly blessed to even be operating at all!

73,  Bill  W4ZV


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