This is how I looked this evening at 8 pm, at the conclusion of the CQ WW SSB contest. I didn’t work the whole contest in “iron butt” mode, but I my throat was sore and my ears were ringing at the end of the event anyhow — I think I’m out of practice (particularly on voice), as I’ve been more focused on projects than operating lately.
I started early on Saturday morning, rather than the night before and took a few breaks during the day. In the evening, I hung up the earphones around 7 pm and went out for dinner and to see the movie “Gravity”. I didn’t get back on the radio until Sunday morning around 11 am, but then worked more or less straight through to the end of the contest at 8 pm.
The notable feature of this year’s CQ WW SSB was the highly energized state of the ionosphere, with solar flux above 160 for the entire contest, and no solar events to spoil the fun. Ten meters was an endless ocean of signals, with stations dotting the landscape up to around 29.6 Mhz. The flip side of this was that atmospheric absorption and noise were elevated on the lower bands, but the trade off seemed very reasonable to me.
By category, I was a single operator, low power (95W), all band station. My ulterior motive during the contest was to find some new ones, so I was “assisted” in that I kept an eye occasionally on the DX cluster and checked my signal on the reverse beacon network. Most of the time, I cruised the bands, just listening for callers, though. As a “little gun”, I didn’t go a lot of calling myself.
The rig was the K3 and my antennas consisted of my attic antennas: a DX-CC covering 10, 15, 20, and 40m (shortened) and a fan dipole for the lower portion of 10m and 17m (the 17m portion wasn’t used). In addition, I had a chance to use the 80m vertical that I had recently modified. Unfortunately, both 40m and 80m were very noisy, both due to atmospheric noise and local QRM. I had anticipated that 80m would be my secret weapon for working the Caribbean an perhaps Europe, but not so much. The conditions were poor on 80m, and those stations were already doing good business on the upper bands.
The contest was enjoyable for the variety of stations worked, as well as the number: 254. I did log one entirely new DXCC entity: Trinidad and Tobago, and worked a number of countries for the first time on phone, including three consecutive voice contacts with Japan. My final score was 123,467 according to N1MM, which I suppose is good, since I didn’t really have a goal. After caressing the data, here is the list of countries worked: Aland Island, Alaska, Antigua & Barbuda, Argentina, Aruba, Austria, Barbados, Belgium, Bonaire, Brazil, Canada, Canary Islands, Cape Verde, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Curacao, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, England, Estonia, European Russia, France, French Guiana, Germany, Hawaii, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jersey, Latvia, Lithuania, Madeira Island, Martinique, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Scotland, Serbia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, St. Maarten, Saba, St. Eustatius, Sweden, Trinidad & Tobago, Tunisia, Turks & Caicos Islands, Ukraine, Uruguay, USA, Venezuela, Virgin Islands, Wales.
As usual, after the contest, I uploaded logs to Lord-Of-The-Web server, and of course, even one else did the same. I checked back and hour later, and my log had not been processed — it must take a lot of computing power to crunch and correlate that many records. Being the patient type, I checked back another 20 minutes later, and sure enough, I saw a familiar post-contest sight:
In addition to the CQ WW SSB, I shambled-on-out for the 2013 Zombie Shuffle on Friday night. I joined in late because of a Vienna Wireless meeting on Friday night, so I only caught about two hours, from ten to midnight. Twenty meters was dead by the time I got there, and 40 and 80 meters were really noisy. I had six tortured QSOs in all, but I’m glad I had a chance to take part in the QRP event.
