[UK-CONTEST] CQ WPX CW - G3XTT

[Donald Field]

My thanks to those who have posted so far. It's been interesting reading the reports.

I was all-band high-power (FT-1000D, Quadra, Force12 C-4 at 50ft, 80m inv-V at 50ft, 160m inv-L at 60ft), SD (Windows version) for logging. I will NOT have won the UK (I am assuming that honour will go to GI1A, operated by Sergei ex-M0SDX, operating, again I would assume, from GI0KOW's place). But the England situation could be interesting - Lee G0MTN and I kept leapfrogging each other in QSO numbers, presumably according to when we took our mandatory 12 hours off-time.

I am always a bit iffy about serious high-power contesting from home. Lots of CQing over 48 hours (well, 36 in WPX) usually brings at least one TVI complaint out of the woodwork, so I tend to do more S&P than I ought, and I often run barefoot during the day on the HF bands to be on the safe side. I did all of that from time to time this weekend, and (touch wood) no complaints so far. My goal was to better my 2003 score and, ideally, also to better G5W's (G3BJ) leading G score of 2003. I managed both.

Unlike Clive and others, Murphy stayed away for once (maybe he was holidaying in GW?). Conditions were better than I had expected, with the amazing Sporadic E on 10m a real bonus (not particularly good for the contest score - mostly 1 pointers - but great for my 2004 country totals!). I thought US activity was well below par. I do realise, as some have commented, that signals were low at times, and there was huge QSB, especially on 15m, with signals varying from S9 to barely readable in the course of a single QSO. But I worked most US call areas on 15, and all of them on 20 (W6 was good both short path at dawn and long-path mid-afternoon). But the stations just weren't there - way down on the level of activity from the US in CQWW (maybe they can't handle the complexity of exchanging serial numbers, hi!). Those who were on seem to favour odd prefixes, so I had well over 1,000 QSOs in the log before I worked a plain, simple K1 station!!

One of the joys is how easy it is to work DX - I guess that, because mults are prefixes rather than DXCC entities, there aren't so many people chasing "DX" in this one and I caught some nice ones for the year, almost always first call. On 40m, for example, stuff like D4B 5N0Z ET3TK ZS4TX VQ5V etc. And nice to be called by friends like Rich 9M2/G4ZFE (also 40m). I didn't do much on 160 as I don't consider that very productive in WPX - not sure why some folk consider that a problem with the rules. The rules are the rules and they dictate the best strategy to follow. 40 and 80 are both important, of course - good rates and double points. So I always take my mandatory breaks during daylight. Actually, 40 was great even during daylight - I had good rates to Europe during the afternoons and it was hard to know whether to run EU at 2 points a time on 40, or W at 3 points a time on 15 or 20 (given that many of the callers would actually be 1 point Europeans)).

Anyway, the totals as computed by SD (and I think there may be the odd gremlin here, but they are probably fairly close), are as follows:

QSOs: 
10  196
15  492
20  671
40  560
80  322
160  61

Total: 2302

Prefixes: 724

Points: 3,568,596

73 Don G3XTT