[UK-CONTEST] WPX CW 2012 - G3P

[Mike Chamberlain]

Another 15m report - but without a 5 element monobander.

I spent a couple of hours on Thursday building an elevated Ground Plane
antenna for 15m using a 12m Spiderpole, twenty meters of cable, G-clamps and
wooden batons to hold 
the Spiderpole to the facia and lots of PVC tape. The radials fall away at
an angle of about 40 degrees below the horizontal and without any tuning the
VSWR was 1.25:1 and I decided that was good enough.

I thought about a low power (100w) entry, but decided that without a beam I
wouldn't be competitive in any class so the extra 6db of power to put me in
the high power section would probably add to the enjoyment. This contest was
all about the fun of operating the radio for a weekend of what turned out to
be good conditions on 15m.

On Saturday the radio was turned on just before 7 am, and the contest
started with some nice JAs and UA9/0s - shortly afterwards signals from EU
started picking up. I think the first US station was KD4D at 10:25 GMT and
after that QSOs came from East and West until I switched off just before
local midnight. The nice thing about the Ground Plane antenna is not having
to worry about where best to point it.  I don't know if I missed them but I
didn't think that VK/ZL, SE Asia and Africa were well represented, in fact I
didn't work a single ZS or VK during the whole contest. I don't believe it
was the antenna as I don't have a problem with those areas in BERU.  With
hindsight I probably spent too much time trying to run, it worked well when
I was spotted, but hard work otherwise.

The Sunday start was similar to Saturday, with the exception that there were
some West coast USA QSOs within the first 30 minutes. At the end of the day
propagation improved  to JA at 22:00 local time (their sunrise) but after
that the rate dropped off significantly and I pulled the plug around 11:30
local time.

Some of the highlights were being called by KH6, KL7 and VP8 (thanks Mike)
and frequently being rewarded for tuning into the RTTY part of the band and
QSOing calls like NH2T, ST2AR, 3V8BB and may others.  The lowlight has to be
failing to work several callers due to the high noise level on the Ground
Plane antenna.  I should have put up a couple of delta loops for receive,
but ended up using my 40m long Marconi instead for Rx on several QSOs.

The rewards for approximately 35 hours of operating were:

QSOs:                          1159 (after removing dupes)
3 point QSOs:               564
1 point QSOs:               595
Prefixes:                       690
Points:                          Approx 1.58 million

Equipment:

Tx/Rx                FT2k with Network Sciences roofing filter
Amp:                ACOM 1000 (400 w)
Antenna:           Ground Plane
Software:          N1MM

A really enjoyable weekend
Mike /G3WPH