ARRL DX propagation/rate observations

[John W. Brosnahan]

I am quite interested in the propagation factors associated with the
differences between Saturday and Sunday on 15M in the ARRL DX phone 
weekend just completed.  For the record this is what George, W0UA, saw 
from here using an IC-781/Alpha 87A into a stack of four 7-element Yagis.
The Yagis are on 48ft booms (essentially the DX Engineering design with
some mods and built from some of my aluminum and some of their parts) stacked
on a rotating tower at 40/80/120/160 ft.  The option to select the lower
pair, the upper pair, or all four is available, but rarely used.  The upper
pair rarely shows any improvement over all four and when it does the
difference is very small.  The lower pair often shows great improvement 
over all four for close in stuff (Caribbean), but during the Euro run a
single 8 element Yagi at 56 ft is used if necessary for Caribbean.
 
HOUR UT     SATURDAY RATE      SUNDAY RATE     SUNDAY  QSO DIFFERENTIAL
 
13-14           39                21             -18
14-15          123               121              -2
15-16          107                91             -16
16-17          102               101              -1
17-18           68                95             +27
18-19           59                65              +7
19-20           46                21             -25
20-21           16                12              -4
 
TOTAL QSOS     560 SATURDAY      527 SUNDAY
 
>From here all I can say is "Thank you, propagation gods, for looking
after us on Sunday".
 
The 17-18 hour on Saturday took a dip from what I would have expected and
I will have to go back to the logs to see if there is a clue about what
happened (lost the freq or whatever).  Interesting to see that the rates
on Sunday for 17-18 and 18-19 actually were better than Saturday's rates.
 
I am planning on writing an NCJ piece on what it takes to be competitive
from this far west.  It will include the results from last year on 10M
where George set new US records on both phone and CW in ARRL.  We have also
been out of the running a few times and it correlates well with propagation.
 
If conditions are reasonable, a monster antenna from Colorado can compete
well with small stacks on the east coast.  If conditions are poor we get
shut out of the European opening and can't compete.  JA is just not enough!!
 
When the ionosphere is disturbed our path to Europe (essentially through
the magnetic pole) is shut off completely, whereas the east coast is beaming
outside the region and gets hurt some but not turned off completely.
 
The continental breakdown on 10M last year tells the story.  Over 60% of
our QSOs were European (on both modes).  Without Europe you can't win and
the east coast has a big advantage to Europe.
 
I hope this stimulates some discussion and we can move past the 24 hour
contest nonsense.  (I support things like providing pins or certificates
for participation above a certain level to encourage the casual operator,
but keep this a real test with a limited number of categories so you
can bench mark your own performance.)  If there are as many categories as
entries, everyone can win, but no one knows how well he/she did.
 
(Unless, of course, a category is created for "best score from central
Weld county-outside the metro area", so we can win something all of the
time.)
 
73   John  W0UN              broz at csn.org