[UK-CONTEST] ARRL CW - G5W

[Don Beattie]

After last year's effort in ARRL SSB, I was keen to try the CW section, and am very pleased I did. A two-person effort here in Multi-Single - Marios, 5B4WN/G0WWW and myself, each with our K3's, set up in SO2R configuration, instead of my normal FT1000MP's. That way, we each had 50% of the contest off, and it was a more relaxing weekend.

What can I say about conditions ? 

Well Friday night/Saturday was a blast, with excellent openings on 80 through 15m. Really great to see 15m getting back to form, and it the rate was good there - peaking over 300/hour for some time.

40 was good overnight (it can get noisy, as everyone knows) but this time, it came good. 80 was excellent (for the first 24 hours we had more mults on 80 than any other band !). 160 seemed OK, but not sparkling on the Friday (it came good on the Saturday night). The new US beverage worked like a dream on 80 and 160, although even then, some of the Western states were a bit scratchy on 160.

10m never delivered - it was so frustrating to see the spots from Southern Europe, but despite leaving the second rig sitting on where KC1XX was, we only heard one brief burst from him and made zero QSOs.

Dreary activity everywhere from after dawn until about 11.30z on the Sunday - there was little around we had not worked. Then it all started again and the last 12 hours was great, with the run still going at 150/hr on the last hour on 40m.

Some awful signals around - wide clicks, and one Hungarian statioin started on 80m with spurii all over the band - not sure what happened to him, but it all went quiet later. 

All in all a great contest for us here - whether we have done well or badly, it matters not. It was just good fun. I'm now sold on the K3 for contesting - so unstressed, it's just unreal.

WinTest v4 was used for the first time in anger here, and acquitted itself well. I have still failed to simulate the situation we got in the FOC Marathon, whereby when using headphone latch, it latches when using the Fn keys, but not when using the paddle. That way, you get the necessary sidetone to send manually. We got it to do it when Justin, G4TSH was here for the FOC, but I can't get it to do it again ! Any WinTest users who know the way (BTW I'm using EZMaster with WT) ?

Anyway, here are the numbers:

 BAND   QSO  S/P DUP  POINTS  AVG 
----------------------------------
  160   204   44   2     606 3.00 
   80   445   53   4    1335 3.00 
   40   965   58  22    2889 3.00 
   20  1259   59  20    3777 3.00 
   15  1130   58  13    3390 3.00 
   10     0    0   0       0 0.00 
----------------------------------
TOTAL  4003  272  61   11997 3.00 
==================================
     TOTAL SCORE : 3 263 184

73

Don, G3BJ