This past weekend was the very popular CQ WW CW contest and I didn’t plan on participating much at all with other things to do with family and friends, but that isn’t exactly what happened. Well on Friday night I didn’t participate at all, but when I woke up on Saturday morning, before anyone else in the house was up yet, I fired up the radio and didn’t get up again until there were 172 Qs in the log!
Saturday morning I woke up, made some coffee, sat down, configured the macros in N1MM and turned the radio on and picked 15m. I started at the bottom of the dial, tuned a station, worked them and tuned up the band to work the next station. It’s always easy to do this at the start since every station needs to be logged. After getting up to the top of 15m and working any others I marked but didn’t work, I switched to 20m and did the same thing there and again on 10m. I finally got up and hopped in the shower, came back, worked the same three bands and had 256 Qs in the log before I needed to call it a day and head out. 15m had the most Qs after I was done for the day.
It’s nice working stations in ZL, ZS, VK, etc on the 1st or 2nd call with my little 100 watts and dipole antennas. I think with 15m and 10m open and active, it even makes 20m more enjoyable without ever single station trying to pack into the only band most people could work them on. I got back home after 11pm local time on Sat night and told my wife I’d just scan the band and see what was happening before I came up, and then 60 mins later I was done and turned the radio off again with another 45 Qs. I worked 40m on Sat night and was able to log a bunch of Caribbean stations but there were also plenty of EU stations I was able to hear and work. Usually 40m isn’t a band I do well on for “DX”, but it was ok on Sat night. I called it quits with 301 Qs.
Sunday morning I woke up kind of late, made some coffee and figured I’d see what was happening on the radio while everyone was still asleep. 40m still had some stations on it but they were all US stations and I had worked them already for the multipliers they provide. I flipped to 20m and started my tuning up and down the band working any new stations I could copy. After about 1 hour I flipped to 15m, spent 30 m scanning the band and then hit 10m. Worked 10m for 1 hour and the rest of the time I was on the radio I flipped between 10, 15 & 20m working any new spots. I operated assisted with the DX Cluster providing spots beyond just the ones I heard and marked myself. I tried to avoid jumping to new spots but as the day progressed I spent more time working new ones for multipliers than I did working stations on countries I had already logged on that band.
On Sunday I was able to work 3 new DXCC entities I had previously not logged. I was able to work AH0BT on Mariana Island on 15 & 20m. I worked E51MAN on North South Cook Island on 15m though it was hard to here a QSL/TU since there was a PD4 station sending his call over the E51 station. And finally I worked ZK2V in Niue on 10m for a 3rd new one logged. Hopefully I’m in all their logs and they use LoTW or I’ll be sending off for QSL cards.
I finished up on Sunday on 40m working more Caribbean and Eastern European stations for what ended up being a total of 573 Qs in the log. Not bad since I didn’t think I’d operate much this weekend. I ended up with 93 DXCCs just on 15m so I was close to working DXCC just on that one band, but I did end up working 117 total entities across all the bands, which I don’t think I accomplished in any previous contest. Some of the rarer CQ zones had large pile ups, if I could even hear the DX station, so I didn’t focus too much on the zones, but I did end up working 30 different zones. I ended up working 13 stations on 4 bands with most being in the Caribbean area.
I worked 400 different operators in the 573 Qs, many of which have become familiar calls. The most stations worked in any one country was Canada, followed by Spain, Germany, Brazil and Italy. 305 of the Qs were worked on countries classified as EU followed with 125 by those classified as NA (primarily Canada and many of the Caribbean entities).
Here’s a map of the contacts based on their grid squares (click to enlarge):
Here’s the N1MM score summary showing contacts, counties and zones by band:
Band QSOs Pts Cnty ZN
7 75 202 40 15
14 152 419 73 23
21 219 614 93 23
28 127 338 61 19
Total 573 1573 267 80
Score : 545,831Logs have been uploaded and sent in. Hopefully I’ll see some QSLs on those new entities. Thanks for all the contacts and enjoy the holidays!
K2DSL
What a terrific job especially for a “not going to really participate” effort!
Congrats on the new DXCC, though I do have one correction for you (and hopefully it’s still a new one for you): E51MAN is actually on North Cook, not South Cook as per qrz.com, http://www.clublog.org, and a couple of other places. I’d actually worked him on 10m prior to the contest where I’d already South Cook confirmed on phone (this contact was CW), but when I discovered that it was North Cook it that made it a new band for me which was a lot more interesting.
I really just played around in the contest, I think I wound up with around 275 Qs, just jumping in and out between doing stuff with the family this weekend (though I did spend a pretty solid block of time Sunday afternoon). I did operate unassisted just to see what interesting stuff I could find on my own, and did find a couple of interesting things here and there, but no new DXCC entities for me.
Congrats again!
Thanks David.
I’ll check out why the logging program determined it to be South Cook. Like you noted, QRZ shows him to be on North Cook. Hope all is well!
Assuming you were using N1MM for the contest and probably just about any logger for your DX log, most likely their input is from the nearly-universal country file maintained by Jim, AD1C. It looks like that was updated on 11/21/11 for contest loggers, so if you didn’t update since then, that would explain it. Details here: http://www.country-files.com/cty/history.htm
In case you didn’t know, for some reason known only to “the powers that be”, North Cook & South Cook both use the same prefix (E5), so it’s pretty much impossible to determine from the prefix alone when the station is operating. It didn’t used to be that way, and I seem to recall there was a fair degree of head-scratching when they made the change.
N1MM ids it properly using the country file but N1MM doesn’t export the DXCC Id in the adif it creates . I’m playing with DXLabs and it didn’t properly calc it. I will look into why but I also suggested to the N1MM list that they consider adding the DXCC Id to the generated ADIF.