CQWW WPX - SSB
Call: WM5R
Operator(s): WM5R
Station: K5TR
Class: SOSB10 HP
QTH: EM00
Operating Time (hrs): 23
Summary:
Band QSOs Prefixes
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160:
80:
40:
20:
15:
10: 1549
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Total: 1549 x 643 = 2,149,549
Club: Central Texas DX & Contest Club (CTDXCC)
Comments:
Station:
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Kenwood TS-850SAT
Ameritron AL-1500
4-element Cushcraft 10M monobander @ 60'
TR Log
W9XT Contest Card
Heil Proset
A couple weeks before the contest, George K5TR invited me to come
operate the WPX phone contest at his new station. The operating room is
part of a new two-car garage that George and his wife began building a little
over a year ago, with the help of their family and friends. While there is
still some finish work remaining, the operating room is mostly complete. It
features its own small bathroom with a shower, a walk-in closet, wall-to-wall
carpeting, climate control, ceiling fan, lots of electrical outlets for both
110VAC and 220VAC, and is wired for ethernet and telephone.
Now that he has a shack, George has recently begun raising towers, of
which there will initially be five, ranging from 30 feet to 120 feet high.
To test the station out, he put a four-element Cushcraft 10M monobander on
a 60' tower. One objective of the weekend was to smoke out any potential
RFI problems in the house and new garage while operating high power.
I had some previous commitments, so I was unable to operate the entire
contest. I basically missed all of Friday night and had to stop operating
about five hours before the end of the contest on Sunday, so I was on for
just about 23 hours of operating time. My favorite time in the contest
was Saturday night local, running mostly Japanese stations. It was a very
good opening, and I've always enjoyed running JAs more than Europeans. I
thought the Saturday morning local opening to Europe wasn't as good as it
was on Sunday morning local.
I tried to exercise the limits of my foreign language abilities
when I thought it would be useful, and there were a few QSOs where using
Spanish numerals helped to complete the exchange. There were two exceptions
to this, one was an Argentine station, obviously not participating in the
contest, who decided that I must speak Spanish and began to converse upon
something, at great length. It took me a while to extricate myself from
that one. Another time was when I was struggling to complete an exchange
with a very weak low power Spanish station, and some uppity east coaster
decided to inform me that his Spanish was much better than mine. Anyway,
I'll probably try to brush up on both my Spanish and my Japanese before the
next one...
Although not the point of the contest, I worked some interesting
DX. An Botswana (EX) station called in (twice,) I worked multiple stations
in Kyrgystan (EX,) and stations in Djibouti (J28,) Svalbard (JW,) Jordan (JY,)
Egypt (SU,) Turkey (TA,) Central African Republic (TL,) and Kazakhstan (UP.)
One U.S. station informed me that his serial number was "Seven hundred twenty
dollars and fifty cents."
It was a lot of fun, and even as simple as it sounds, this station is
a vast improvement over my usual "home" station, N5XU, the club station at
the University of Texas. The location at K5TR is superb. When George
puts up his stacks of monobanders, it will be even better.
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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