[UK-CONTEST] 21/28 MHz CW Contest G3BJ

[Darren GØTSM]

Well, I thought I'd get on and see how long it would take me to get to 
100Qs and then get on with some DIY. I had the dipoles laying in the 
garden from the ssb contest so considering the improved prop it should 
take me up to late morning,, or so I thought.
As in the SSB contest the station is a pair of MP's, 100W and a pair of 
dipoles, but this time both at 27ft. The 10M dipole was fixed N/S and 
the 15M dipole rotary. The SO2R box is homebrew and the log is Writelog.

I was actually on the air for about 7 hours on/off during the day and 
managed only 99Qs. The busiest it got was when 2 W's called me on 15M 
and at the same time a delayed EA8 called me on 10M, not so bad but I 
was eating my tea at the time. I'm a quite a bad cw op so just one 
calling is enough for me but two in one ear, one in the other and a 
curry in the middle, thats a recipe for disaster..
A highlight for me was when someone at S9 sent a warbly 'V' so I replied 
VK8?,,, and VK8AV came back, now if only I could enhance my psychic 
powers then I could have had his complete call in the log entry field 
before he'd even tuned onto me. (Really, I heard him earlier up the band 
on the 2nd rx :-D )

The WAG contest just got in the way for me, I wasn't loud enough to work 
our DL friends on tropo/scatter so just had to pick up the odd few that 
peaked up for a few secs.
To have to S&P a mult through the army of WAG'ers was quite a task and 
quite frustrating. I used the cluster again but that was a waste of 
time, the band maps just filled up with WAG'ers, even the W's all seemed 
to be WAG'ing this year (or JARTSing). Nice opening to SE Asia on 15 and 
also JA in the morning, but all were WAGing. Hmmm, did anyone hear 9J2BO 
or was he WAG'ing too?

I guess there's four options,
1) Leave the contest alone and suffer the wag'ers, WAG looks more 
attractive than the 21/28 because you have ssb and cw and more choice of 
bands to operate on.
2) Move the contest to another date.
3) Combine the cw with the ssb contest. But here you'll end up with a 
'mixed mode' category.
4) Make the trophy's non returnable and make them out of gold.

What was good: Hearing G3PSM on the air with a pile of W's (nice one Colin)
And bad: (besides the WAGers) hearing OBK, VHB et al working stuff I 
couldnt even detect, the joys of Hendy Ford's CCTV system (at the bottom 
of the garden) QRMing HF!

Fav contest?, think I'm leaning more towards the IOTA contest at the moment.


Darren



Don Beattie wrote:
> I support all Peter, LET's, comments. 
>
> The plan here was to enter reasonably seriously to test out the new SO2R box, but to do that I needed a good number of potential S&P targets. After I called a few and got told off for daring to call them when they were in WAG, I realised that this was not going to work. Even HS0AC replied to me, and spent longer explaining that he was in WAG than it would have taken to work me !  But I got called by lots of Germans !
>
> So late morning I opted for packing in and going out for a long walk on the hills ! 
>
> The clash of date means, I fear,  that this contest is going to have a struggle to get momentum whilst all the big contesters are opting for WAG.
>
> But as far as I was able to test it, the SO2R box worked very well !
>
> 73
>
> Don, G3BJ
>
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