[NCC] CQ160 CW PJ2T Multi-Op HP

[James M. Galm, W8WTS]

CQ 160-Meter Contest, CW - 2020

Call: PJ2T
Operator(s): K8ND W8WTS
Station: PJ2T

Class: Multi-Op HP
QTH: Curacao
Operating Time (hrs): 27:07

Summary:
Total: QSOs = 1528 State/Prov = 57 Countries = 85 Total Score = 2,154,424

Club: Mad River Radio Club

Comments:

Congratulations to IG9/S59A, CR3W, P40AA, and all of the other category winners for great results in a fun contest. All of the competitors, especially the Europeans, are inching the bar higher and higher every year.

For the eleventh year, PJ2T was operated in the multiop, high power category by Jeff, K8ND and Jim, W8WTS. Jeff and I have been operating together for many years, always pushing each other to send louder and listen harder on top band.
Conditions were well above average this year, allowing us to score our second highest finish in this contest.

Improvements and maintenance never end at a world class contest station located
3500 km from home. Jeff arrived the weekend before the contest, checking the antennas and equipment, making to-do lists, and staging the tools, parts and materials needed for upgrades and repairs. Jeff found very few breakdowns or problems at the station. The most serious was a broken beverage due to some construction in the area. I arrived on Tuesday before the contest. Jeff and I started outdoor work on Wednesday. All things considered, there was very little outdoor repair needed. The beverage was easy to splice back together, so we started down the lists.

Some of our receiving antennas are set up temporarily for contests and brought in afterward to thwart theft and to keep them in like-new condition. We have deployed our DX Engineering active four square receiving antenna so many times that it takes little time and almost no effort. The antennas and parts seem to know where to go. This year, we made five movable bases for the antennas out of paint cans, rebar and concrete, so that we can fine tune the orientation of the four square. We use a Brunton pocket transit to accurately set the directions for the elements. There is a run along the edge of the water where we used to have a permanent beverage pointed toward USA and JA (both are in the same direction from Curacao), but the antenna was removed to make room for some construction down the road from the station. That beverage location always yielded good performance, so we installed a temporary 268m beverage along the edge of the cliff above the water.

After dark, we worked on our setup of five separate CW Skimmers, each fed from a different receive antenna via various combinations of active receive antenna multicouplers and magic T splitters. We use two powerful Dell Precision mobile workstations to run the five instances of CW Skimmer software and a local DX Cluster node server to aggregate the spot streams, filter the spots and deliver them over the station LAN to the logging computers. We made QSOs to verify operation of everything. I operated in the CWOps Mini-test on Wednesday evening and the NCCC Sprint on Thursday evening to help find bugs in the station and because they are both very fun contests. By Friday, all of the SDRs, antennas, computers and software were running great. We set up the log template and relaxed prior to the contest start.

At 2200Z, CQWW 160 starts in full daylight at PJ2T. The first hour is always a slog, where we work all of the big USA stations in the first few minutes then listen to the Europeans, who have been in darkness for two hours, feed on each other like a tank of piranhas. The USA stations are listening for a bite at Europe, so no one is listening in PJ2T’s direction. After the first hour, we logged only 23 QSOs and 18 multipliers.

The pace picked up in the second hour as the sun started setting, having 93 QSOs and 40 multipliers at 0000Z. Signals were good the first night, but not excellent. We noted rapid QSB that made callsigns difficult to get on the first try. We worked our JAs the first night approaching local sunrise. We ended the first night with 950 QSOs and 123 multipliers.

We started the second night at 2200 Z, with a predictably weak first hour in full daylight. As the band opened up the second night, signals from both NA and Europe were clean and solid. We were able to beat our QSO goals for 8 hours the second night. The last QSO on Sunday morning was at 1154Z with W6UB. Sunday afternoon was spent storing some of our receive antennas and picking up after the contest furor. There is very little to work during the last hours of the contest, but we were on the air calling just in case the odd Caribbean station showed up. We did manage to work 1 station (KP4TG) in the final hours of the contest.

It appears that we have the top score in North America and South America. Those Europeans are very hard to beat when they step over into Africa or Asia.
Nonetheless, it was a very fun contest with the second night providing some of the best conditions in recent memory. We thank everyone for their QSOs and are already looking forward to next year.

Very 73,

Jim, W8WTS and Jeff, K8ND


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