[3830] CQWW SSB NQ4I M/2 HP

[webform at b41h.net]

                    CQ Worldwide DX Contest, SSB

Call: NQ4I
Operator(s): W4LT,VE7ZO,W4DD,W4IX,K4NV,K4BAI,WA1S,W4QO, NQ4I
Station: NQ4I

Class: M/2 HP
QTH: Griffin, Ga.
Operating Time (hrs): 48

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Zones  Countries
------------------------------
  160:  168    14       37
   80:  348    29       95
   40:  836    35      109
   20: 1159    38      128
   15: 1171    34      139
   10:  175    18       45
------------------------------
Total: 3857   168      553  Total Score = 6,917,995

Club: South East Contest Club

Comments:

Once again the NQ4I team started the contest with high expectations. Sunspot
Smoother Number had been at it's highest value in nearly 5 years. 15 meters was
so alluring with promises of JA's all three nights, and 10 meters was teasing us
with the thoughts of EU in the daytime and possiblly JA's at sunset. The SSN
plunged nearly 50 points in 24 hours from Thursday to Friday before the
contest. With all that in mind, we headed into the CQWW SSB test. 

This past summer, a severe lightning strike had disabled a large amount of the
hardware inside the NQ4I station. Insurance for the equipment helped dampen the
damage, but it has taken nearly 12 weeks to get the claim settled. I decided
that we would fall back to M-2, as we had enough equipment to do that. 

Operators arrived from all over the SE US. The start hour approached and 'we
were off to the races". 40m was a bottomless pit of qso's...both on our
transmit frequency and split. 20m was as near dead at the start as it could be.
We realistically had propagation on 20m from sun-up to 1 hour after sun-down. It
hardly opened at all during the rest of the time. Great news was that there were
no equipment failures. Software worked flawlessly all weekend long. 

Operating M-2 had it's share of learning mistakes to overcome, but the NQ4I
team responded quite nicely. It kept us busy most of the weekend to take
advantage of 16 band chages per hour. Co-ordination was done with 3 "contest
directors" , VE7ZO, NQ4I, and W4DD. Lock-outs were in place for in band
protection, but we learned that the co-ordinations between bands took extra
effort. Hats off to the Team for working through the difficulties. It is so
easy to jump back into the old M-M mindset and just sit down and make
qso's....

15m was not as promising as it had been in the days prior to the test. We also
worked only 3 EU's on 10m...DR1A, IU9T, and CQ3A. The band just never opened up
to EU. Very good openings to South America, but our qth is too close to the
Caribbean for some of the easy one's there. 

Thanks to all the great dxpeditions that made this weekend memorable. I really
can't remember a list as long as the one on NG3K.Com in the previous years. 

Thanks for the Q's and see everybody in 4 weeks in CQWW CW...de Rick NQ4I


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