[3830] Oceania CW ZM90DX(ZL2IO) SOAB HP

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                    Oceania DX Contest, CW

Call: ZM90DX
Operator(s): ZL2IO
Station: ZM90DX

Class: SOAB HP
QTH: Waimarama Heights
Operating Time (hrs): 14

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
  160:           
   80:  126   102
   40:  100    78
   20:  242   175
   15:  249   165
   10:  317   175
-------------------
Total: 1034   695  Total Score = 2,385,240

Club: East Coast Contesters

Comments:

That was a part time activity as we also had house moving on the agenda. At
least all the big stuff had to be moved as I had a truck borrowed over the
weekend.
The contest starts late Saturday (9pm local) here in NZ. It was about that time
when I had unloaded the truck from the last Saturday tour. 

The family is used to the fact that radioing has a very high priority and I
appreciate their support. So I got my dinner sandwiches served at the station
which I was still unpacking and setting up when the contest had already
started.

I was going to use the special call sign ZM90DX which the Kiwi DX Group is
using for the next year to commemorate 90 Years of DXing achievements from New
Zeland. That cover many DXing world records of the time include first ever
contacts between VK-ZL, South America - ZL, North America - ZL and finally the
first ever trans world contact between UK & New Zealand. But please refer
to the website WWW.ZM90DX.COM to see more of the interesting history of those
days.

Back to the contest: Station was our K3 with KPA500, Antennas are currently
limited to a hexbeam (20-10m) & a vertical  (80/40m) with 3 elevated
radials for 80m only. 15m was wide open into Europe still at about 1am local
time. I did not spent a lot of time on 40m as we have plenty operators with 40
m capability and I will use the special call also during the coming ARRL DX
& WPX contests with a much better antenna set up by than. Instead I spent
more time on 80m (at very low rates) where most of the other operators have
limited antennas and got at least 100 EU stations in the log. The 80 m band was
a dream this night and sounded very quiet. Unfortunately the SWR dropped down to
1:2 and the KPA500 limited the output to only 200W. But it was raining and I had
no motivation to find out the problem at that time.

I heard NH2T super busy with very high numbers rocking on all bands. He had to
work split which I was also almost going to do. I don't like to work split in
contests due to the band width needed but DX cluster and every one being zero
beat by only clicking o the spot make running a high rate difficult at times.
So my hint is move a few tens of Hz and have in mind that most male operators
hear deeper frequencies easier than higher ones. The other hint I'd like to
give is: Never go faster than the operator! There may be a reason for his/her
slower than normal CW even on the high bands. Try to run a high speed CW pile
up with everyone zero beat if you have echos due to both LP & SP
propagation at the same time. 

Local Sunday morning showed up with a nice open 10m band and gave me some good
runs into USA before I had to focus again on the house moving business... I
tried again 80m during the sunset /grey line but only a few US stations and one
single G4 made it into the log. 
I was really tired after that weekend and already in bed before the contest was
actually over. But I had to be back to the salt mine on Monday morning...

73 Holger, ZL2IO / ZL3IO


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