This past weekend was the big CQ WW SSB contest. I had other obligations Friday night, during the late day & evening on Saturday and almost all afternoon and evening on Sunday. But despite limited time, the contest was a blast. I had a sore throat all week and had nearly lost my voice, so it was a bit rough starting out on Fri and getting going on Sat & Sun mornings, but it didn’t bother me too much once I was warmed up.
We had horrible weather too on Saturday with downpours during the afternoon and evening. It just never let up. But despite the weather, the conditions during the contest were good. 80m and 40m were typical during the twilight and evening hour. I made a combined 23 contacts on those bands because which more then anything helped with multipliers.
On Saturday, 20m was wall to wall. With a G5RV wire antenna, the signals are coming in from all directions, so there’s a tremendous amount of noise/splatter during a phone contest. I started making contacts on 20m and then switched to 15m to see what was going on. I was able to make a good number of contacts on 15m and at one point I had more 15m contacts then 20m. That was never the case for me before this contest. 15m is just so much quieter then 20m that it is a pleasure to work that band. I switched back and forth during the day between 15m and 20m.
On Sunday I could only work the contest during the morning and very early afternoon hours and I again switched between 15m and 20m tuning up and down the bands and then switching to another band, doing the same S&P and switching back. I ended up with 175 total contacts which isn’t a large number, even for me, but I was pleased with it for the amount of time I could spend on the radio. I was also really happy I was able to make so many 15m contacts.
When I got home from work on Monday I checked the logs and I ended up with contacts to 66 DXCC entities. None of them were new, but I already have some new 15m confirmations showing up in LoTW for entities I hadn’t received confirmations for in that band. I spent Monday evening taking the log from N1MM and importing it into Ham Radio Deluxe. I sent off the logs to the contest sponsor on Monday or Tuesday morning.
Thanks to all the ops for pulling my little 100w signal out of the air and a special thanks for all the ops that took a moment to say hello along with their report. In a phone contest it’s nice to speak with folks that I’ve made many contacts during RTTY or CW contests and we’re just running macros. And my call is becoming familiar enough with some ops that if they catch DSL they say something like it must be K2DSL. I guess the SCP helps out with that too.
Here’s my contest summary from N1MM:
Band QSOs Pts Cty ZN 3.5 13 25 6 5 7 10 18 7 4 14 93 247 53 15 21 59 157 37 14 Total: 175 447 103 38 Score : 63,027
73,
K2DSL