[3830] CQWW CW G5W(@G3BJ) M/S HP

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                    CQ Worldwide DX Contest, CW

Call: G5W
Operator(s): G3BJ, G3WPH, G0OPB, G0WWW
Station: G3BJ

Class: M/S HP
QTH: Woolston UK
Operating Time (hrs): 48

Summary:
 Band  QSOs   Zones  Countries
-------------------------------
  160:   251    13       68
   80:   953    24      105
   40: 10781    34      121
   20:  1102    37      138
   15:   857    38      136
   10:   863    31      127
-------------------------------
Total:  5097   177      695  Total Score = 9,665,248

Club: Chiltern DX Club

Comments:

Quite an interesting weekend in CQWW CW.  

Mike, G3WPH, Tony, G0OPB, and myself formed the team â€" augmented by Marios
G0WWW for a short while on Sunday.  We debated whether to go for MS or M2 and
in the end chose MS. With just three, I think this was probably right, but next
time I’d like to try M2 if we can find one or two more good operators. As it
was the third operating position for monitoring and mult spotting was simply
not used.

We had a few visits from Murphy before the contest, with one of the rotators
starting to stick (some bad water corrosion â€" don’t know how) and about two
hours before the contest the K9AY failed â€" broken link in the controller â€"
easily fixed). But one beverage mysteriously didn’t work, and requires
investigation.

Thanks to Tony, we did a “proper” job with the receive antennas this time,
with am 80/160 diplexer and 80 ad 160 BP filters, so that there were no
problems when the stations were operating simultaneously on 160 and 80. Very
effective.

Conditions were a bit of a mix for us. LF seemed good (low static) but I sense
the absorption was high, as some of the DX signals were weak to unusable,
particularly on 160. Surprisingly we did not work JA on 160, nor zone 3, but
this could have been because 80m was going like a train, and we probably
elected for the fun of the run, rather than some deep noise DX-chasing on 160.

Operating manners on LF seemed a lot worse this year. DX was permanently
covered by continual callers, and timing was everything in getting the QSO.
Kudos to GZ5Y, running a big EU pile on 20m, and very weak here, who responded
to one fast call from us in a microgap in the callers !

10m was rather disappointing on Saturday and even Sunday morning, where it
seemed to want to stay in bed a while, but finally got going Sunday afternoon
with huge runs to the US.   15 , 20 and 40 were banker bands, but 80 surprised
with big volumes and for a long time had the most QSOs. 15 and 20 on Sunday
morning suffered badly from long echoes and we lost some JA QSOs simply because
it was impossible to copy the calls, and QRS evidently does not translate to
some languages !

Some appalling signals, sadly, with B-I-G clicks, which marred an otherwise
enjoyable event.
 
An interesting technical issue with WinTest which I intend to follow up. We
used VE7CC and the huge volume of skimmer spots to help load the multiplier
window, but sadly noticed that some had very short persistence â€" a couple of
minutes sometimes. We think this was because they frequency may have been
overwritten by a subsequent spot, but I think there is something that might be
done in the software to not overwrite mult spots. I shall enquire of the
WinTest reflector. But overall skimmers were responsible for quite a few of the
valuable spots. I was going to run a skimmer here, but in the end the
integration issues were too complex to fix in time.

A great weekend, and thanks to everyone for the QSOs. Thanks also to Tony, Mike
and Marios for joining in.

Don, G3BJ

Equipment:

Run and multiplier stations: FT5000s + linears, BP filters, Microham/EZmaster

Antennas: 40-10 yagi @ 80ft, 3 ele Steppir @ 60ft, dipoles, 90ft vertical
(160-8â€"40), K9AY and beverage

Monitoring station: K3 + BP filter, Butternut

Logging by Wintest


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