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.
