[3830] CQ160 CW K5NA Single Op HP

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                    CQ 160-Meter Contest, CW

Call: K5NA
Operator(s): K5NA
Station: K5NA

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

Summary:
Total:  QSOs = 1397  State/Prov = 58  Countries = 71  Total Score = 653,901

Club: Central Texas DX and Contest Club

Comments:

After doing a single-op assisted last year, I wanted to try my hand at doing a
regular single-op effort this time.

Signals from both Europe and Japan seemed to be pretty good. It is rare to have
both directions working well in the same night. 

However most of the DX signals had fast QSB that made me ask for many repeats,
especially from European and JA stations. In a six letter callsign I would
likely get a couple of letters the first time and a couple more the second try.
Finally after about 3 tries I could fill in the blanks. It seems the QSB would
peak and drop out two or three times in a single callsign. It was really fast.

Friday night started quiet but after local midnight (0600Z) the QRN got bad.
Then around 1200Z the band got quiet again during the middle of a JA run.

The second night the QRN came up about 0300Z but things got quiet again about
0600Z. It was a very strange weekend of changing band conditions.

I wasted a lot of time doing S/P even though it was difficult to get a DX
callsign without listening a long while. I have never been good at doing a 2nd
VFO during single band contests especially on a noisy band where all the DX
signals are very, very weak. But I felt I had to spend the time doing S/P to
get my multiplier total higher. And to do that I had to stop running and did
S/P.

The bright point of the weekend was the number of JAs that I worked. I worked
about 100 JAs on Friday night and 25 more on Saturday night. I think that is
the most ever in a single weekend for me on 160M.

This is a great contest. I do wish the single-op operating time was a couple
more hours.

73, Richard - K5NA


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