[Fourlanders] CQWWVHF contest report

[Bob Lear]

We kind of decided at the last minute to do the CQWWVHF contest here at 
W4ZST with the W4NH club call sign and didn't get much publicity out.  
Jim had bought a new Icom IC-9700 and thought it would be a good time to 
put it to the test.  This was only the weekend before.  We only had 
W4KXY, WG8S and W4ZST show up as operators but Ron WW8RR came to 
supervise us later Saturday evening and two of our local club members 
came to visit for a while then too, Aaron KK4EHJ and Andrew AK4EU.

Results:

Band    Mode    Q's    Grids

50        FT8        67        25

50        SSB        337     120

144        FT8        21        10

144       SSB        3        3

TOT                    428    156    Final points submitted 70512.  Sent 
in to CQ yesterday.  Also posted on 3830 scores.

We were first thinking that we would not really be competitive but the 
nice band openings changed that.  6m was open from the beginning of the 
contest for 3 or 4 hours before we ended up changing to FT8.  We also 
saw (on the panadaptor) plenty of activity on the new FT4 mode that had 
only come out last week before the contest but we didn't try any FT4 as 
there was good activity on voice and FT8.  Especially since none of us 
had even had time to try it or even read about it.  Jim and Kim arrived 
later than they had planned and missed the beginning of the contest.  I 
had the nice pile ups on 6m all to myself and made 170 Q's in 2 hours 
and 20 minutes.  Not a bad rate.   Did this without a voice keyer too as 
I had problem getting the audio to work in N1MM and didn't have Johnny 
here to help troubleshoot.  Of course, I never touched the radio knob or 
turned the beams, just kept working them one after another.  And had a 
lot of fun doing it.  I haven't been operating much in the contests but 
got to this time for sure.  For all that time I had the opening, I could 
see activity on the panadaptor in the CW portion of the band, the SSB 
portion was full from .125 to at least .225 and FT8 and FT4 frequencies 
were also busy the whole time.  Some nice opening. And I was 
particularly pleased to see that here was so much voice activity.  I 
don't know if it's because of the folks that do this contest vs the ARRL 
contests but the ARRL contests have been 60% or more digital.  Ops just 
weren't getting on SSB even though the conditions were good and the Q 
rate would be higher on voice than on FT8.  Don't know what they were 
thinking but I hope this will be a trend.

Unfortunately, we missed a good opening on 2m that occurred at the 
beginning of the contest.  It was open as far as Minnesota and North 
Dakota from reports we got.  Heard about that later as I was just having 
to concentrate on 6m and didn't really even have time to look over at 
the 2m station.  Would have been nice to see how the 9700 performed 
there but......  We were pleased with it for the 24 Q's we did make.  
Just like any contest when 6m is open, there is usually little activity 
on 2m.

We had the IC-7300 on 6m with Jim's Beko amp running about 750 W on 
Sideband and cut down to about 400W on digital.  The beams and omni's 
were still up here.  On 2m we had Jim's new IC-9700 and my 2m LUnar 
LInk, also running about 750 but back to 400 or so for digital and we 
had the 2m beams and omni's available.  Both stations performed great.  
No real problems and N1MM has made it easy to operate WSJT modes from 
within N1MM and easily switch back and forth between voice and digital.  
That used to be a problem as it meant closing one program and bringing 
up the other and also not having the JT log going directly in to N1MM 
like it does now. Very nice work by the N1MM group.  The voice keying 
problem was more likely me than them.  The logs agreed nicely and stayed 
synced the whole time.   My wish is that the N1MM guys figure out how to 
do 'Dupe' checking when we are using WSJT.  That would be a nice feature.

We had a thunderstorm Saturday night and disconnected the antennas for a 
while then.  Jim went to Dominos and picked up some sandwiches and pizza 
for us on Saturday night and we had enough pizza left over for lunch 
Sunday.  Kim went out to McDonalds to bring us biscuits for Sunday 
morning breakfast for the three of us here then.

We enjoyed the contest.  Next year we will keep the CQWWVHF on the club 
schedule and have more participation.  Folks had already made plans 
since we were so late deciding.

73, Bob W4ZST