[UK-CONTEST] WPX CW - G5W

[Don Beattie]

I was not planning to do CW WPX this year, as for some reason I'd been careless enough to get a number of commitments that meant that there would just be no time over the weekend. However, a couple of these diary dates cleared during last week, so I thought I'd do a last minute Single Op effort with zero preparation. The downside was that remaining commitments meant that I could not select the 36 hours during which I would operate, as I needed to be off at specific times to do other things.  So no chance to get a multi-single team together, and I was not holding out too much hope of any sort of good score.

 

I elected to focus on LF, with the x2 multipliers, and Saturday morning gave a good start. Conditions seemed good, although I could not get sustained runs going to the US, yet signals were strong. I slept Saturday morning after dawn for four hours and then did a couple of hours before having to go out. Then operated from early evening until I decided that overnight LF on Saturday was simply not working, and fell into bed about 02.00. Got up after another three hours, which meant that I had by then used up my 12 hours "off time" and had to run through to 24.00 Sunday.

 

Overall I found it tough going. Runs at any speed were hard to get going - the peak rate I have in any hour is 127, which is poor by "with sunspots" standards. The latter part of Sunday was dire here, until a couple of hours before the end, when everybody moved to LF and there was a good crop of easy mults available.

 

Nice to see good short skip on 10m, and even Far East stations. Galling to hear the 9A stations working runs of JA on 15, with little to hear here. But overall (perhaps I was on the wrong bands at the wrong times) I would not describe conditions as sparkling.

 

Didn't really put SO2R to use over the weekend - WPX does not seem to lend itself to this as much as CQ WW, and anyway, my brain was hurting.

 

I suppose every contest is a learning experience, and I surely learned something on Sunday afternoon. I had got myself a nice spot on 20m, and was running at a reasonable rate, when someone came up and said "signal splatter 3 kHz wide". I denied it (everything was OK here) but he persisted. So I asked for his call, and he gave some SV3 callsign. I kept operating, but put the second rig on the same band (antenna off) to listen. Sure enough, totally clear (in fact surprisingly clean). However, in that 5 secs it took, the SV3 had metamorphosed into an IU3 (same keying, same tone, exactly same freq) and was calling CQ on my nice clear freq. Nothing would move him. I think that's what is called a distraction tactic.  I won't be conned a second time !

 

Pleased to say everything worked here (despite zero preparation) and WinTest was its usual bomb-proof self.

 

Here's the basic data:

 

BAND   QSO DUP  PFX  POINTS   AVG 

-----------------------------------

  160    23   0    8      46  2.00 

   80   270   1   78     742  2.75 

   40   685   8  294    2579  3.76 

   20  1100  12  251    2128  1.93 

   15   550   8  149     744  1.35 

   10   331   0   65     375  1.13 

-----------------------------------

TOTAL  2959  29  845    6614  2.24 

===================================

      TOTAL SCORE : 5 588 830

 

Equipment: 2 x FT1000MP/MkV + linears

40-10 yagi @ 80ft

Steppir @ 60ft

Dipoles at 80ft

90ft vertical (80/160)

K9AY

Win-Test/EZMaster