[UK-CONTEST] ARRL 160m Contest - G5W

[Don Beattie]

This was a "first" for me. I had not entered this contest before, having been put off, I think, by the thought of having to break through the wall of "local" stations in the US/VE to make QSOs. But I decided to have a moderately serious try this year, and I am glad I did. Whilst the score is modest, it was good fun, with some really steady runs to the States, and a good selection of Section multipliers.

It seemed a contest of two halves here. Band conditions here seemed good on the Friday night/Saturday morning, and the rate was (for 160) quite encouraging. But Saturday night was dire, with long spells of little to work. I also think that absorption was much higher on the second night, and many of the signals were in the noise, and rather auroral in sound. It may be, of course, that I had worked many of the stronger 160 stations on the first night, which meant that Saturday evening was a case of mopping up the few strong ones not worked, and then getting down to the wet-noodle brigade.

Overall I felt the noise level on 160 was not as quiet as it might have been, with some level of static at times, which made copy a bit of a challenge occasionally. Whether to CQ or S&P is an issue for this contest, as I get the impression that a number of the rarer mults were S&Ping. I tried to do both, listing around on the second receiver during the receive period of more or less continual CQ-ing. I probably got this wrong, but it seemed right at the time.

Great fun, and (for an unsocial hours contest) quite easy on the system as sleep is just time-shifted a few hours.

Apologies to any who found three G5W signals on the Friday night. An SM station called me on Saturday morning to report spurii 18 KHz either side of my main signal, and it subsequently transpired (as you may have seen from an earlier post) that Elecraft had released a technical note in late November, which I had not spotted. It reported that over 100 K3s had been shipped with faulty Power Amplifier boards, in that an extra component (I think from an earlier version) had been left in place on the board. The fix was a ten-minute job, but if your K3 is serial number 3000 to 3138, you should check to see if it also suffers from this problem. On the Saturday evening all was well, but I apologise for any issues I caused on the Friday evening.   

For next year, I will put up a beverage for the US (I do not currently have one, and use the K9AY). But it was noticeable that some signals were hard copy on the K9AY, and could be copied better on the SW/NE beverage !

Ended up with just under 450 good QSOs and about 51k points, with 57 section multipliers.

All in all, great fun.

73

Don, G3BJ