[UK-CONTEST] Marconi 144MHz CW Contest report G4ZTR

[John Lemay]

Morning all

A few notes from the past weekend:-

The Marconi 144MHz CW contest took place over the weekend. It's one of the
premier events for VHF CW enthusiasts, and draws good support from much of
Europe, but little from the UK !

For a number of years, I've entered the 6 hour section and decided for a
change to go for the 24 hour section this year. Equipment was a K3, internal
transverter, and Beko solid state amplifier, about 450w in the shack.
Antenna was a single 16 ele from I0JXX up at 40ft or so. Mr Murphy arrived
dead on time and ensured that my footswitch, which worked perfectly the day
before, no longer wanted to take part in the contest. It was hurriedly
rewired.

Tropo conditions were not expected to be good, so I wasn't disappointed. For
the first few hours it was difficult to make good progress, with all the
Europeans working each other at good strength, and not hearing weaker stuff
such as the UK. The contest rules allow the use of ON4KST Chat to arrange
skeds, and this was useful on several occasions, including quite early on my
best DX with a DL at 825km in JO61 square. Several attempts with GM4VVX in
IO78 proved fruitless - we've been there before.

I certainly did not stay up all night; the activity levels did not make it
appropriate. I hoped conditions might be better on Sunday morning. Wrong !
Not only was tropo still poor, but heavy rain, often static, plagued much of
the morning. The K3 noise blanker worked pretty well, but at its most
aggressive setting quite a lot of intermod was heard.

I thought my luck was changing when OL7C was heard, quite clearly, and loud
enough for me to call with confidence that I'd recognise my own call coming
back with a report. But my repeated calls achieved nothing more than endless
CQ's from them. Presumably they run a lot more than 400w. Late in the day I
heard OK1AR, which would have been nice dx at around 910km, but he didn't
hear me either. It's the first time for several years in this contest that
OK has not been workable for me.

In summary, 87qso's with a best dx of 825km. Average distance worked was
around 380 km per qso.

A contest best forgotten, looking forward to better things next year
........

John G4ZTR





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