[CQ-Contest] The CQ Contest (TA2BK & CQ WW SSB 2002)

[Berkin AYDOGMUS]

TA2BK is on the air & CQ WW SSB 2002 

It's always a fun operating the CQ-WW Tests, but it's extraordinary doing it from my alternative qth here in Bozcaada, IOTA AS-099, in the near vicinity of the ancient site of Troy. It seems that being near Troy gives some additional dB, hi hi  (see the claimed scores of the Macedonian Team which were guests in this qth during the WPX-CW Contest )! 

Of course you have to be very accurate in terms of the ferry-schedule. Murphy had its first appearence on the 400 km trip from Istanbul towards Bozcaada, therefore we missed the last ferry at Friday. Next one meant next day 0700 Z. Well, no other way! Murphy the second: Keys of the house were forgotten in Istanbul, therefore we had search for the person on the island who had the spare ones. We were quite lucky as he was "not in the fields" and could be found in about one hour.

I was accompanied by Selim,TA2DS who would never and by no means miss such an activity, even as a spectator but mostly as the "technical chief"... Well, the recently acquired TS-850 had to get a connection cable to the amp etc etc. " Jefe" Selim would never let somebody else doing such things, as nobody than him would get those things "perfectly perpendicular".

Finally, with almost a delay of  11 hours TA1E/0 was on the air ! Of course or as usual no desktop mike and no voice synthetizer, which meant also a good deal of test for the throat, hi ! Meanwhile Selim was busy in taking care of other items. One of his top items on the agenda was cooking. I would like to propose an award of  "The Best Cooking Ham" to the CQ-Magazine. I'm quite confident that Selim will be a winner in series,even in the "mixed" category competing with YL's and XYL's... I am ready to make this qth available for this "special contest" with a good deal of any sort of herbs and other useful ingredients readily available in the garden...

Antenna was moderate (3 El-Tribander, 11 m off the ground), the amp lazy, pushing out only 300 W (spare tubes were forgotten in Istanbul as well-Murphy the third) but conditions  were superb. Therefore qso-rates were impressive, peaking to 150 or sometimes more qso's per hour. A very contributing factor of course was the "Special Contest Menu" of  Jefe Selim, hi !

Well, with some "tactical techniques" I was able also to work some nice multiplicators. I observed that quite a lot of  stations in the Caribbean especially had some sort of "fixed" antennas to USA, absolutely neglecting our part of the World, including Europe. One of these "Mighty Guys" from was very loud, even beaming towards USA, but his problem seemed to be ignoring any call besides USA or any signal below S9 +++ and continously activating his "parrot". He missed at least one multi, unfortunately I missed one as well. The other observation was the absence of quite some European countries such as T7, T9, Z3 and ZA. Hopefully next year there will be some more activity there... Thanks to the DL and SP Stations for the nice points.

I ended up with .... qso's, ... DXCC-Entities and .. Zones. I wish I had contributed more to my team "TA2BK is on the air". Thanks to a bright idea of Berkin, TA3J we decided to commemorate our Founding Member and great person Bahri by participating to the contest this way. See you next year, hopefully with less Murphies and better antennas. 73! Aziz SASA, TA1E/0



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