[UK-CONTEST] WPX CW 2012 - M3W

[Nick Totterdell]

OK Chris - here is a report! I also enjoyed the splendid 15m conditions.

I operated from Lincolnshire from our holiday home where I continue to have some planning issues. As a result, this would be the first opportunity to operate from here since Beru in March 2011. I spent Friday completing the erection of an 80 foot tower and putting a 5 ele monobander on top. 

In the evening I tried to get my Microham 2R+ working but it didn't like my FTDX5000 or I couldn't remember how to connect it up. By midnight on Friday I could transmit via the Microham so went to bed.

Starting at 6am, propagation to JA/BA was already pretty good so I combined S&P and running and averaged about 60/hr. Worked JA6TIT shortly followed by DL3BRA and wondered if they had come across each other. DL3BRA called me again on Sunday for a dupe - two contacts is logical.

EU was not great because the skip was so long and my beam quite high. A second lower aerial would have helped. The big guns from NA started coming through very early.

Propagation dropped off around 4pm for a while - probably the MUF was too high? Best run was 105/hr to W6 in the evening. Late on, propagation was weird with JA and W6 coming from the NE.

Went to bed at 863Qs.

Started again at 6am and had a quick look at the records on my iPhone. The record for SO HP 15m for G is 1715Qs, 670 pfx = 2.7M - set by G5G in 1999.

Normally the second day is not so good as the more active stations have already been worked, but I thought that if I was a bit more determined, with the excellent propagation, I could reach the record. I wound the speed up to 32wpm and tried to run more than S&P.I reached 1000 Qs at about 8:45am.

I managed to keep the rate between 50 and 80 for most of the day and didn't notice any drop off at 4pm on Sunday but I found that beaming NE helped. I find that the efficiency of a run frequency is inversely proportional to the distance from the bottom of the band - conversely, the chance of holding onto the run frequency is directly proportional to the distance - so you can't win.

Late evening was interesting - worked ZL, W6 and JA consecutively with my beam pointing due north - magic. In the evening, there was loud static noise to the west which made that direction pretty unusable.

Through the contest there was really no place on the planet that was never contactable and many simultaneously. Also some contacts had multipath signals that made them almost unreadable - it sounded like two stations calling on top of each other but there was only one. Lots of contacts were by back-scatter - so a DL station could be workable when pointing west but not when beaming at Germany.

At 11pm (2200UTC), I was getting no callers for 5 mins at a time, so I did a final S&P from bottom to top. I had already worked the vast majority but picked up 4O3A in this final search.

I ended after 34hr50min with 1855Qs, 888 pfx = 3.7M (claimed). I suspect that there are a wider variety of prefixes active than in 1999 so a higher score is slightly easier to achieve now.

Equipment was the aforementioned Yaesu and monobander with amplifier.

73
Nick
G4FAL/M3W