It’s taken me almost a week to get to posting about this years CQ WW SSB contest. The conditions for me were terrific with 10m & 15m seemingly open throughout the contest. This was my most productive effort in this contest and I’m sure the conditions were the main reason I stayed at the radio for as long as I did. In this contest, other than a couple of quick multipliers, all the contacts need to be with stations outside the mainland US.
Friday night I had a little time and got on and made some contacts working just 45 Qs all on 20m before calling it a night.
Saturday morning I woke up late and got on working 8 stations on 40m, which was the only time I got on 40m the entire weekend. I went back to 20m for about 1 hour picking up a bunch of EU stations. With the hex beam still pointed to EU I went up to 15m and the band was hopping where for another 90 mins I tuned up the band and worked station after station, which isn’t always easy for me on 15m in the morning.
After logging TF3CW in Iceland I switched to 10m where I spend the next 3 hours! I started at 28.300 at the bottom of the phone portion of the band and worked my way up with station after station calling CQ up until 28.985. It was a blast and on 10m, it’s not a lot of effort to work the station – if you can hear them they can usually hear you. Since I was S&P and not using the DX Cluster, any station I worked was found by tuning. It’s always great to come up on a station that hasn’t yet been spotted and is just calling CQ waiting for someone like 9K2HN in Kuwait who I found on 10m and then later on 15m (both for new bands worked and confirmed already on LoTW). It was just so much fun and I had 300 Qs at 2pm ET / 1900z when I took a little break. I got back on for a bit later on Sat afternoon and worked VK4KW in Australia on 10m. I worked more stations on 15m before I had to call it a day at 7:30pm ET / 2330z in order to head out to a Halloween party with my wife and friends. I wrapped up Saturday with 394 contacts logged.
Sunday morning got me back on the radio again hoping the conditions were still good and I wasn’t disappointed. I started out on 10m and there were plenty of stations to work. I worked 100 new stations on 10m with my first pass up and down the band. I even worked 2 Qatar stations on 10m which for a new band. With the antenna still pointed at Europe I worked some more stations on 15m and 20m. I’d move the antenna south from time to time to work the Caribbean & South American stations that were active. Late in the day the antenna moves to the northwest and you can start to work Alaska, Hawaii and Asia. Activity for me started to slow down the last 90-60 mins of the contest late on Sunday.
I ended up working Guam easily on 10m again, Dodecanese on 10m (still need a confirmation for DXCC on any band which I just did via OQRS) as well as many other new entities worked on new bands, some of which were already quickly confirmed via LoTW. In the end it seems I worked 94 different DXCC entities and 27 of the 40 CQ zones. I worked 40 stations on all 3 bands I operated and 538 different stations in total.
Here’s a map using ADIF2MAP of all the contacts over the weekend (click to enlarge):
Here’s N1MM’s score summary for the effort:
Band QSOs Pts Zone DXCC
7 8 10 5 4
14 164 464 21 64
21 196 555 20 65
28 331 961 22 75
Total 699 1990 68 208
Score : 549,240
Great weekend and thanks for all the contacts.
K2DSL