[UK-CONTEST] CQ WW Phone EI7M M/S

[Pete Lindsay]

Interesting to read all the reports on here for this year's CQ WW Phone
contest.

We have been rebuilding the station at ''7M for the past couple of years,
especially on the HF side during which time we were restricted to LF
contesting in the main. Last year we had a temporary system in place and
were lucky to be on for the really exceptional conditions. Much to our
surprise and delight we managed to beat the 20 year old M/S EU record, but
in the end, still had to settle for 2nd place.
This year after a lot of effort we are back to full strength, as a few
weeks before the contest we were lucky to have the right weather conditions
at our exposed site to erect the new rotating tower and multiband stack,
see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzeB3FBY7Ik . But the planned shack
refreb, requiring the removal of all the RF equipment, meant that at T
minus 14 days the shack was completely empty. Thankfully, everything worked
when we put the station back together .. a big relief !

We had a great start with a couple of hours of excellent runs into NA on
40m before we tried out the lower bands. Here we were met by S9 plus QRM,
which took out 160m altogether. Slight panic set in, but we continued the
best we could until we had time to investigate the problem, which wasn't
sorted until Saturday afternoon. By the end of the first night we were well
behind our 2011 score.
Things improved greatly once we moved up to the higher bands. 15m on
Saturday morning was buzzing and we had lots of strong JAs calling. By the
afternoon we were running as fast as we could to NA on 10m, with our best
clock hour bagging 338 Qs. Our new antenna system seemed to be working and
the hard work paying off.
With the noise problem sorted Saturday night was much better, although we
spent most of the night running NA on 40m, at least we could now pick up
the much needed mults on 160 and 80.
HF conditions were down a little on Sunday, although we did still manage
some excellent runs on 15, again peaking into the 300 Qs/clock hour.
In the end we were very pleased to have a score only slightly down on last
year. Mults were down, but QSOs were up.

BTW, for those that don't know, this is a great site for claimed scores,
http://pileup.ru/cqww_ssb.php?year=2012



 BAND   QSO  CQ DXC DUP  POINTS   AVG
--------------------------------------
  160   150  12  60   2     185  1.23
   80   463  18  82   3     664  1.43
   40  1619  33 119  19    3809  2.35
   20  1695  38 137  14    3766  2.22
   15  2117  35 138  15    5060  2.39
   10  3217  39 151  42    7778  2.42
--------------------------------------
TOTAL  9261 175 687  95   21262  2.30
======================================
       TOTAL SCORE : 18 327 844

73's

Pete, G4CLA