Topband: CQ 160 Meter SSB DX Contest - a Report from Cairo

[Jim Sorenson]

CQ 160 Meter SSB DX Contest - a Report from Cairo

 

I wish to report that I have survived my first Top Band DX contest intact. I have been anxious to activate on 160 in Egypt as SU9AM for some time, but due to the usual space restrictions and high noise level I put it off till most of the other bands had been investigated. After receiving a number of emails from members of the group offering very welcome advice on how best to get started, I decided to try Bill's (W7TVF) idea and implementation of a short vertical with two top hat wires. I live in a five story apartment and very fortunately have complete access to the roof, which is square shaped and has about 90 feet on the diagonal. I have a clear shot in all directions with roof level being about 65 feet off the ground. It's an excellent platform for antenna experimentation and so far I've built a monoband 2 element 20 meter beam, a 4 element 10 meter beam, bobtail curtain, verticals for a number of bands, and various loops - not all at the same time, of course.  The 20 meter curtain rod vertical ground plane worked Japan twice   this summer using 250 Milliwatts output.  

 

I  was able to manage a vertical wire of about 45 feet off the roof, supported by a base section of ¾ inch pipe, a twenty foot aluminum curtain rod, topped with a  5 ½ meter extendable deep sea fishing pole. It looks a lot better than it sounds. One set of guy ropes secured it fairly well and the base extended down into the central open stairwell about 10 feet and was lashed against a heavy vertical drain pipe. Two 65 foot top hat wires extended down to the edges of the roof at about a 45 degree angle.  

 

After laying down six radials and tying them into the elevator shaft frame, a water pipe extending to the ground, and a hundred foot elevator cable lying lose on the roof (presumably in excess of the needs of the owner after a major elevator overhaul last year after the elevator burned up, caused when Mrs. El Sharkawy's kitchen caught on fire and spread to the elevator shaft) I was in business. 

 

Just a note: the fire department is about 5 blocks away and it took them 45 minutes to get onsite.

 

The antenna loaded reasonably well with a ballpark SWR of around 1.4:1 into the RG-8 after a lot of tweaking of top hat wires. The trusty Autek RF-1 made the task much more enjoyable than the usual method of having the XYL (K3DKA) on the headset in the shack reading out SWR numbers to me on the roof.  I think this antenna was performing with reasonable efficiency considering its lack of vertical stature in degrees and the haphazard nature of its radial system. We may be operating as high as 20% efficiency - with any great luck. 

 

My rig of choice is a KWM-2A, but I brought back my IC-706 so I could operate top band. The 706 is about the only rig I would consider trying to smuggle in through the airport.  With the head control off, it passes very nicely as for a small stereo amplifier. Good thing they did not find the control element.  

 

Noise conditions were fair to good for Cairo ( there are probably a million people living within one mile of us, all with poorly designed and manufactured TV sets and satellite dishes, not to mention the universal use of florescent lighting in all buildings both interior and exterior. Fortunately the power lines are all underground and also it was very dry and hot this weekend which lessened the familiar 'fried eggs' QRN we get at night from the dampness - we live close to the Nile. I made a couple of CW contacts on Friday night before the contest started (2am local time), but finally went to bed after being unable to contact anybody SSB. 

 

I replaced some coax and did some further antenna tweaking on Saturday and noticed that SY8A in Greece was coming in at 20 over around 5 pm. I worked him and than strapped myself in for the long haul. Over the next twelve hours I made 30 contacts in 17 countries and had a thoroughly delightful time doing it. On Sunday I made a few more contacts (very much diminishing returns) and ended up with 35 contacts in 19 countries. This was not a great total, but for someone who expected absolutely nothing to start with, it was wonderful. 

 

The band would drift in and drift out - I managed to time my breaks with this cycle of ups and downs. My method was simply to call the big guns and wait to get through. Nearly every contact was a chore for them - I was rarely recognized on the first call. In fact, my SU call was of no help - it actually was a hindrance, because most of the OMs could not figure out what I was: SV, SP etc. Most were first astounded, then obviously pleased and appreciative when they finally figured out that I was an African multiplier. The majority of these contacts were made with club stations.  It was neigh impossible to find (without commanding and holding a frequency to sit on all night and call CQ) independent stations to talk to. I found, though, that I could work just about any station I could hear, with few exceptions. Some took longer than others and I would wait for the band to crest and then I'd hit them.  Many stations sounded like they had left their voice keyers on and then went out for dinner.  

 

What I heard from SU over the weekend was a rather narrow swath to the NW, bordered on the west by Italy and on the east by the Georgia and the Ukraine. I heard absolutely nothing west of Italy and no other African stations. Apart from two Israeli stations that I could never manage to raise because they were skipping around over the guns, I heard nothing to the east. My best DX was Finland and then Denmark, both solid contacts. I also noticed that station modulation quality was pretty poor in general. You could really pick out the few stations whose modulation was outstanding: clean, readable, not overly compressed, just transparently clear. HG1S and HA5JI were among the best. I spent quite a bit of time checking on the stations the top guns were working and did not hear any DX being worked outside Europe or Central Asia. My sense was that Africa was almost completely dead? But it's very likely that stations on the Med coast west of me, say in Morocco, were piling up contacts with Europe?  At least they could have been with Spain, France and the UK - countries I never heard - I did hear one G in fact. 

 

>From listening I would guess that SY8A and UU7J will both place pretty high in the results, along with DJ4PT. I wish I could determine if I was hearing and working a representative sample of what was active in Europe, or if I was screened off from most of the major activity by distance, band conditions and/or a weak receive system? I think it is likely that given my location and antenna, I was actually hearing only the mega-stations (and a few low power independents) in the Balkans, Ukraine, and mainly Eastern Europe. I will be interested to see the distribution of contest stations in Europe when the results are out.  

 

Just a note of interest - I did hear SY8A madly calling ZL1HY on 1830.00 for the longest time. It was my distinct impression that ZL1HY was being heard, but perhaps SY8A simply mistook another callsign. 

 

This weekend's exercise was embarked upon primarily to prepare me and the station for CW and working some serious cross pond DX, but I'm more than gratified that I was able to work many parts of Europe on SSB. However, I still have a long way to go with regard to putting up the best possible transmitting and receiving antennas for my particular local constraints. A contest like this is a setup up for working new countries, of course, and I hate to think how long it would take for me, if ever, to work as many countries on SSB without such assistance.  Hearing that the UK was being worked on CW from the U.S. at power levels down to 1 watt over the weekend, made me stop and think that even with a low efficiency antenna, low power and a high noise level, DX is still possible.  

 

I had prepared a phased rotatable two element phased loop suggested by Doug/NX4D for receiving, but I did not finish it in time. For receiving I used the 706 and vertical and found them far better against the noise than I expected. I have a Harris RF-590 working with a flag and expected that I would receive with that combination, but this particular flag does not play as well as previous ones (need to rewind that toroid again), so I stuck with the 706 and it's noise blanker, which I found works surprisingly well against the type of noise I'm up against. DSP would have helped, but my 706 is basic vanilla. 

 

I'm going to lengthen the antenna, lay down a lot more ground wires (wire is cheap in Egypt), and finish optimizing my receive system. I tore down the entire antenna system today and will model it after I've re-measured the wire and top hats. Then it will go back up again as Mark II with the receive array, hopefully by the weekend. 

 

Thanks to all for your much appreciated suggestions and advice. You may be 'hearing' from me soon!

 

73s,

 

Jim 

SU9AM/W3BH

Cairo