[3830] WPX CW M5E(G0CKV) SO(A)SB40 LP

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                    CQWW WPX Contest, CW

Call: M5E
Operator(s): G0CKV
Station: G0CKV

Class: SO(A)SB40 LP
QTH: London
Operating Time (hrs): 34

Summary:
 Band  QSOs
------------
  160:     
   80:     
   40: 1034
   20:     
   15:     
   10:     
------------
Total: 1034  Prefixes = 643  Total Score = 1,840,000

Club: Chiltern DX Club

Comments:

I live in a suburban London location and do not have any permanent antennas in
the air. Every contest involves a bit of field day or dx-pedition travails. The
rear garden is well screened from the rest of the world by houses in every
direction and a dense jungle of shrubs and trees.

For 40 I have played with loops, inverted vees and verticals. My present
favourite is a vertical in the middle of my rear lawn. This year I used a 40 ft
solid glass-fibre pole as the support for a vertical with elevated radials. An
extension and a cap hat on top raised the current-max on the vertical as much
as was doable with the means at hand. The theory is of course that a bit more
RF would escape above the surrounding screens. The radio is a K3 which has a
truly wonderful receiver for CW. WinTest was doing the logging and it is superb
at that.

Contesting is and should be fun. I did half-serious contesting back in the
1960s pre-family and pre-career as SM6CKV and SK6AB and with other calls. This
was big-station stuff. In the last few years I have slowly been getting back
into the hobby. Earlier this year I did ARRL CW as M/2 from one of the big
stations in OH-land. That was fun but would have been even more fun if the sun
had cooperated and the polar absorption hadn’t raised its ugly cap. A couple
of weeks later I joined another M/2 team at a big W6 mountain-top location for
ARRL SSB and that was good fun too.

Operating from a suburban location with low power and wet strings is different.
It is certainly more challenging but also [me thinks, your mileage may vary]
very satisfying. You don’t really need a superstation to do OK and have fun.
You don’t have to worry about keeping your run frequency because you won’t
â€" it would be a time-waster so it is better to walk away with a smile when
the bullies step on you (actually, only one did this time). You stay away from
the big pile-ups where the button-pushing cluster slaves who couldn’t afford
a receiver when they had bought the power amplifier are making a mess of it.
You have to use your brain because you will not succeed in a brawl.

The first night started well. Two hours into the contest I had bagged 150 qsos
through old-fashioned non-assisted s&p. It seemed that most everyone was busy
trying to run so my serial number compared favorably to the European big-gun
runners at that time. This may be a particular feature of WPX which is pretty
democratic in terms of multipliers; almost every participant is a multiplier so
you don’t need to be in a rare dx location and you won’t see the associated
pile-ups. After the first night I was well ahead of my score from last year but
my head felt in need of a pillow.

You would do better in any contest if you think and plan ahead. I didn’t. So
I woke up and got back to the band midday on Saturday. The only decent signal
on the band was DR1A. I tried to run and struggled to extract a few weak
callers from the noise. Attenuation was dreadful. I repeated this on Sunday. In
a particularly slooow period a friendly neighbor called in and out of six other
qsos 3 were gratefully logged dupes. ON6LY called me and gave me serial number
001 and that cheered me up as I was sitting there feeling lonely. I suspect
ON6LY will be a unique but I have the recording to prove that it wasn’t a
hallucination.

The band didn’t die after the first night but it was in poor shape so
everything went downhill from then on. I could work all I heard in the
Caribbean and South America but Asia was a different story. I wasted too much
time calling JAs and BYs who had reasonably good signals here but who pretended
that I didn’t exist. I did work one BY, YE1C and one VK though. Solar flux was
increasing during the weekend but there were also magnetic disturbances which
may account for the miserable condx after the first night.

I guess I qualify as an oldtimer (aren’t we almost all nowadays?) and I am
very happy operating without assistance. I hate the DX cluster. No, let me
correct that, I like the technology but I despair about the operating habits
that the cluster seems to have fed. The Skimmers and the RBN probably will
bring its own problems but right now it is like a fresh breeze of innovation
and relief from the cluster stuff. My experience is that the RBN adds to the
fun factor. In this contest I didn’t have time to even switch it on the first
few hours but from then on it helped keeping the interest and activity up. On
Sunday I had worked most of the eternal runners so by then the RBN gave the
appearance of providing plenty of false spots but that was simply because more
or less everything real had been worked. What remains to be worked can only be
reached by running.

There are some interesting prefixes out there nowadays. I proudly logged
OM2011IIMF, DR11BUGA, DA2MORSE, LZ855SRKM, OM75IHWC, PC65ISWL and more of the
same. I seem to have missed GQ000000THEREARETOOMANYZEROESINTHISCALL.

Next weekend: UK CW National Field Day and IARU Region 1 Field Day with the
local club as G3UES/P. Why not get on the bands and make a lot of European /P
stations happy.

73 de Olof G0CKV M5E


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