[CQ-Contest] DE A6/DL2CC A61AC story

[Frank Grossmann]

Here are some random comments on my A61AC operation in the CQ WWDX SSB 
1998.
I prolonged my stay, probably until this week's sunday. Look for me on 
the bands.

-Dubai
In the days before the contest I already figured that it won't be 
perfectly easy to do the contest for a real serious attempt. The shack 
is in a room inside the house. This was going to be a SSB contest. A 
family with 7 members is supposed to sleep in the same house. The 
antennas are not as good as I thought. No easy way of putting up new 
ones. The radio is one TS440S instead of 2 (two) FT1000MPs (I know I'm 
spoiled - thanks John). You're in a very exotic place and want to meet 
people and do sightseeing. And you have a terrific host who is not a 
contester. In general the impressions from this city and the people I 
met were so intense that I didn't really care. After all this is just 
one of many contests.

-Antenna work
On friday before the contest I enjoyed some nice pile-ups on the high 
bands. The antenna is a 3 ele trap yagi. Friday afternoon suddenly when 
tuning up on 10m there is indefinite SWR on all high bands. Running 
outside I can see nothing wrong. Of course, because everything is 20m up 
from the ground in the hot desert air. Climbing the tower halfway up I 
give up. I just don't trust it. It's not like a Rohn tower that looks 
straight and actually is. This one doesn't even try to look straight. It 
looks bent and it is really curvy and kind of frightning. How do I 
explain this to the boss, A61AC himself?
Lucky me. YO8RCW, Michael Muhammed, as he calls himself - shows up. Just 
to stop by and see what I am doing really... 10 minutes later he is on 
the top of the tower and shouts "I find it the problem!!". So he brings 
down to the coax totally missing its outer shield for 10 cm about 1.5m 
below the connector for the yagi. Hm! It got stuck in the rotor or 
whatever. Not having a soldering iron we find a way to fix the coax. 
Michael climbs up again. "It will held forever, I know how to fix 
things". I believe him. I am ready to believe in anything. It's 12 hours 
before the contest. So we go in the shack. Zero noise. Nothing. Total 
short circuit on the coax. I say "Rumanian repair work ?". He climbs up 
again like a monkey. With him he brings the coax and the HyGain Balun. 
Coax is actually good. Balun has short circuit. We open it, there is 
about 1kg of dust in it and the rest looks burnt. So we throw it away 
and make a connector to connect the coax directly to the antenna. 
Michael, 4th time on the tower, connects it. It works.
Good. Until Saturday afternoon around 11Z. Exactly as N1DG promised, the 
bands go down. I actually take a nap. Get up 1.5 hours later. Bands 
still dead. 2 more hours later the bands are still dead. I mean, not 
dead. But Europe (I pretty much work everything with one antenna 
direction) is simply too weak. I turn the yagi to south america and to 
work some PY. Suddenly Europe comes up 4 S-units. "Yeah, we have Skew 
Path" ?!? I run outside to find the antenna about 160 degrees off it's 
Saturday morning direction. Thanks, Murphy! Saturday evening and 
Michaels 5th time on the tower...

-40m on saturday evening
You hear russians who claim to have 50 watts being 9+30 on 40m and you 
call them, yourself equipped with 400 watts and a dipol, and they don't 
even have a clue that somebody is calling... My radiated signals seem to 
be absorbed by the nearby desert.
Saturday evening CN8WW tells me "I already have a 4 as the first digit 
in my QSO numbers" and works one stateside station after the other. 
Yeah. I have a four in one of digits as well...
So I get really frustrated and go out into Dubai city for some hours 
together with Michael. What the heck. In total I operated 36 hours out 
of the 48. I believe in single operator breaks like WPX has. 

-80m and the truth in signal strengths
I never got that many 59+10 "excellent signal" reports before like here 
on 80m.
One example is HG5A who was 59+ here on 3792 but couldn't hear me for 5 
minutes. One should not even think of the power they might be running... 
HG5A "CQ TEST HG5A" A61AC "AC?" A61AC "AC?" A61AC "F6KPX 5915" "CQ TEST 
HG5A" A61AC "CQ TEST HG5A" A61AC "CQ TEST HG5A" A61AC "A6 ? 5915" "A61AC 
beautiful copy 5915" 

-160m
No antenna. With the 80m dipol I heard IH9T and RZ9AZA but they couldn't 
hear me.

-80m and the virtual DX station
Sunday night I left a nice 40m pile up to go on 80m. I announced my 
frequency 3.715 on 40m, somebody put it on the PacketCluster and I had a 
nice pile up on 80m.
The funny thing is they all kept on calling and calling without hearing 
me at all. Even my friend Harry at OT8T went "Franky from OT8T OT8T 
OT8T" several times. I gave all of them reports and came back to all of 
them but only after 5 minutes somebody actually heard me replying.

-USA
In a SSB contest the most fun part to me is to work a stateside pileup. 
Now in A6 you don't really get that. At least not in this year's 
contest. I heard the east coast on 20, 15 and 10. However, the big guns 
only came up to about S4 on any of the high bands. That means you don't 
even have to try to call CQ...
So by Saturday evening I worked about 20 USA stations so far. On Sunday 
evening it was about 50 stations. Most of them on 10m. Ain't that great.

-EU
I hade some really nice runs on 20 and 15 on saturday morning. I even 
had 7Q minutes. The Europeans are a bit harder to tame than W/VE but I 
somehow managed.

-Full calls please
About taming. Those Italians and Spanish come in with 9+20 and give you 
only 2 letters of their call. You go "full callsigns please". Silence. 
"Doe youe havvve callsigne ?". The same 2 letters again. Why is there no 
Q-group for this ? How about "QFC!" ? There is actually a KFC around the 
corner from A61AC. The menu is in arabic and english but offers 
basically the same as in the USA.

-10m
With the few hours lost to the wrong antenna directions on saturday I 
knew better on sunday and went outside every hour to check the antenna 
direction. It actually moved again some 60 degrees off... The god of 
conditions was with me on sunday and gave me exciting hours on 10m. The 
pile up was incredible. I went by countries for a while. Calling "Spain" 
or "Italy" still gave me quite a solid wall of signals. I found out that 
when speaking german I could handle very quickly a pile up of DLs, OEs 
and HB9s. K1ZM called in and asked "do you speak english ?". That was 
kind of funny. He was the first of a short run of east coast stations, 
all maximum S4.

-20m
Reading HZ1AB's comments on the late sunday 20m opening to the U.S. made 
me sad. I missed it! Or it wasn't available in Dubai.

--
Frank Grossmann (DL2CC)        http://www.grossmann.com
please always use frank at grossmann.com as e-mail address!


______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com


--
CQ-Contest on WWW:        http://www.contesting.com/_cq-contest/
Administrative requests:  cq-contest-REQUEST at contesting.com