Conditions were excellent for the 2014 CQ WW SSB contest this past weekend.  Starting Friday night at 8pm, I got on the air and worked some stations but not much. In total for the evening I logged just 35 contacts and it was the only time I was on 40m. I saw 10m stations being spotted in the cluster but I wasn’t hearing any when I listed on the band. It was well after dark and 10m usually won’t be open anyway.

Saturday morning I got on and worked stations on 15m and 20m before checking 10m and finding it open. When it’s open, it’s the best place to be and stations all migrated to 10m. There were stations on from the bottom of the phone band at 28.300 to 29.100.  In the late afternoon, I moved the hexbeam to the west and worked the following exciting, for me at least, sequence of stations on 10m:

VK9LM – Lord Howe (new DXCC)
VK2GGC – Australia
KL7RA – Alaska
KH7XX – Hawaii
ZL2AL – New Zealand
6 JA stations
AH2R – Guam
Some more JAs
AH0BT – Mariana

I was off the air at 7pm to head out for a Halloween party with my wife and friends.  Saturday ended with 396 Qs in the log and 88 different DXCCs which is 1 DXCC worked every 4.5 Qs.

On Sunday morning I slept in a little (late night at the Halloween party!) but 10m was still hopping when I got on the air. Though I worked stations on 15m & 20m, I spent most of my time on 10m where again a large portion of the 10m phone band was active with stations.  One station in England that was calling CQ asked me how the frequency was and I told him he’s 20+ so it wouldn’t matter what was around him but it was indeed a clear frequency. He replied he’s just running 100w into a dipole. When the band is open, the band is open.

I needed to stop operating at 3:30pm ET which is 4.5 hours before the end of the contest. it was hard to turn the radio off knowing there were more stations/entities that could be worked. I ended up logging 617 Qs and added 10 more entities on Sunday for a total of 98 DXCCs logged. Probably if I was aware, I would have gone DXCC hunting for 2 more entities to have logged DXCC in a weekend.

Here’s a map of the stations worked generated using ADIF2MAP (click to enlarge):

Here’s my N1MM score summary:

 Band    QSOs     Pts    ZN   DXCC
    7       8      19     5      7
   14      94     264    17     53
   21     182     527    22     69
   28     333     976    25     85
Total     617    1786    69    214

Score : 505,438

Worked 28 of the 40 CQ zones. The top worked DXCCs logged were Germany, Italy, Spain, Slovenia and France. Though I worked just 8 stations on 40m, 2 of them I worked on all 4 bands I operated. There were 23 stations worked on 3 bands. There were 498 unique callsigns in the log.

Terrific weekend on the air!

K2DSL