[3830] CQWW CW M6O(G3WGN) SO(A)SB80 HP

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                    CQ Worldwide DX Contest, CW - 2020

Call: M6O
Operator(s): G3WGN
Station: G3WGN

Class: SO(A)SB80 HP
QTH: io80ej
Operating Time (hrs): 22

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Zones  Countries
------------------------------
  160:                    
   80: 1189    18       72
   40:                    
   20:                    
   15:                    
   10:                    
------------------------------
Total: 1189    18       72  Total Score = 141,750

Club: Chiltern DX Club

Comments:

A fun weekend on 80m, even though the original plan was to be on an HF band. 
Now I think the ‘M’ in my contest callsign stands for Murphy.  Whatever,
Murphy came for a holiday last week, camping in the antenna field.  He
couldn’t bear being idle so got to work there and in the house. I’ll spare
you the long list of his successes and my traumas; but the relevant ones are:
the raising winch (big industrial Ramsey unit) failed with the tower at about
35ft and the Ultrabeam 4-el decided to stop moving its elements on any band. 
Factory reset and calibrate functions failed to fix it and all the cabling and
motors checked out good with an ohmmeter, so no HF until I can take it down.

I had hastily put up an 80m dipole at 30ft on the tower for Thursday night’s
RSGB Autumn Series CW event.  I was worn out from all the Murphy chasing, so as
it’s the only antenna in the air at the moment, decided to give away a few
points on the band rather than attempt more antenna work.  I knew from the
Thursday event that I could run Europe with the dipole, but didn’t expect much
more.  Wrong!  Who knew that you could have so much fun with a low dipole on
80?

The last time I entered SOSB 80m in this contest was 1999, when I won UK and was
7th in Europe.  Having had no significant time on 80m in the meantime, I found
it difficult to set a goal; especially since I was unlikely to pull all-nighters
on Friday and Saturday nights.  N1MM tells me I was in the chair for 22 hours,
but none of that between 0100 and 0545 either night. I would be happy with about
500Qs I thought.  That was reached on Saturday late afternoon. 

Final tally was 1189 net QSOs 18 zones 72 DXCC for a score of 141,750.  10
dupes, not too bad; 3 of these were due to being spotted as OM6O.

Quite amazing for such a limited antenna.  I could work as far as z18 going east
and scraped a z3 QSO with Arizona going west. Almost no SA or Caribbean and
every NA QSO was like pulling teeth.  But the runs into Europe were fantastic. 
Best hour was 0704-0804 Saturday with 158 Qs; peak rate 228/hr during that run.
Some nice DX too: 5T3, ZM4T, BY, VP9 (beat an intense pileup first call) etc;
fall-off-chair moment was being called by XE2X and completing the QSO easily.

What was notable was the lack of additional multipliers to chase. There were
some spotted that I could hear (E2A and a couple of BYs and 7C1 come to mind)
but I couldn’t raise them. Couldn’t break the pileup on 8Q7ZO, but generally
few gotaways.  No new multipliers worked on Sunday at all.  Conditions generally
seemed poor and the lack of DXpeditions definitely showed.

Setup: K3 + amp; N1MM+; 80m dipole at 30ft fed with 122m coax.

73, David G3WGN  M6O


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