ARRL 28MHz Contest

With the sunspot cycle still humming and 10m lively during the week, it was time to plan on being active during the ARRL 28MHz contest.  I actually planned in advance for this one and had the vertical up and tested prior to it going dark on Friday.  I even played with the tapping point on the torroid to improve the match.  I’m getting more practiced at getting the Spiderpole mast up in the garden and the top of the pole was at 50 feet this time and it was visible over a far greater area!!  Excellent – time for a beer or two.

Propagation predictions indicated that the band would open at about 0700 and die at about 1800.  So on Saturday morning I was on the band at 0715 and had my first QSO.  When I called the second station the computer crashed – and I mean died – no blue screen of death – just dead !!  To cut a long story short I was getting an intermittent high SWR on the vertical and I assume the resultant RF in the shack was bombing the PC.  So the vertical had to come down.  It turned out to be a whisker of coax braid flapping around in the breeze so it was easy to fix, but it probably cost me a few hours.

Conditions were quite different to the CQWW a few weeks ago, or maybe it was that there are far less expeditions for this event.  Saturday was spent searching and pouncing on CW, mainly Europeans in the morning as I'd missed any chance of the DX to the east sorting tha antenna out, and then the band opened up well to the States in the early afternoon.  As predicted the band died just after 1800.

On Sunday I was up at 0700 again and managed to work a few stations to the east – VK, JA, BV.  But I always seem to miss out to the east and I failed to work 9V, JT, NH2 and VR.  I tried a few CQs during the morning but never seemed to get a run going.  There was one exception when I held a frequency for about 40 minutes and worked 50 stations.  Then a loud Russian with an appalling signal CQ’d in my face so that was the end of that.  Then conditions went strange for a while with multiple echoes on both Far East signals as well as some of the nearer European ones which made CW copy very difficult.  At 1pm I seemed to have worked most of the stations on CW so I had a play on SSB for 90 minutes.  (This was mainly due to the antique ARRL rule that says assisted single operators go into the multiple operator mixed mode category - so you may as well pick up a few multipliers!)  I think that I have now remembered why I hate HF SSB contests!  Later the path opened up well to the US and it was easy picking them off.  Then, at around 1700 (an hour early?!), just when I was homing in on my self imposed QSO target, the band fell off a cliff and died.

So the numbers:

(Remember this is 100 watts into a vertical – no beams – no linears !!!!)

CW      435 QSOs

SSB     62 QSOs

So I just missed the 500 total target.

Countries          69

US States         46 (inc DC) – with Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, North Dakota and Utah being the elusive ones.  In total I worked 255 VE’s and W’s.

A total operating time of just over 13 hours for an average of 38 Qs/hour.

A very enjoyable event and probably the last one of these for a number of years.