ARRL DX Contest, CW
Call: K8CC
Operator(s): K8CC, KK8I, W8MJ
Station: K8CC
Class: M/S HP
QTH: MI
Operating Time (hrs): 48
Summary:
Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
160: 57 46
80: 234 82
40: 994 112
20: 820 113
15: 904 106
10: 221 82
-------------------
Total: 3230 541 Total Score = 5,242,290
Club: Mad River Radio Club
Comments:
This was a pretty unusual contest weekend for us. To begin with, we decided to
go m/s rather than our usual m/m. My retired parents are living with us here
now so bringing in a 10-14 man crew for the weekend was not an option. The
prospect of declining sunspots seemed to reinforce the decision, although in
retrospect the condx were good enough that m/m would have been fun.
Unusual aspect #2 came into play when the electricity went out around 2210Z
before the contest started. After about an hour, with daylight fading rapidly
and mulling over the prospect of not operating, we hooked the 5500W Generac
generator into the house electrical system and fired it up. We've never run the
station off the generator before, but we thought we could get by being m/s.
Well, with the rest of the house running too (my folks had to have TV :-))keying
even one 1500W output amplifier was enough to drive the flourescent lamps in the
shack nuts due to the voltage dips. When the well pump kicked on it was even
worse! We dropped back to 500W output and everything was happy. After two
hours, the mains electricity came on and things got back to normal.
We had spent most of the first two hours doing S&P with an amp on one radio and
an FT-1000D @ 200W for the other. Our first shift with legal power on 80M
provided consistent runs showing how good the low bands were. 160M was good as
well - we were caught without any good receiving antennas for the weekend, yet
we worked a fair number of European mults to go with our usual Caribbean
scores.
But 40M was the high point for us this weekend. Experience has shown that this
station (3L full size @ 120') runs EU the best late in the opening. The first
night was good in this regard but the second night was even better. From
0600Z-0830Z I ran 270 Europeans, which might bring a yawn from the 40M op at
KC1XX but is darn good business here. Additionally, both Saturday afternoon and
Sunday afternoon provided good runs from 22Z-00Z. In the end, we wound up with
a total that (at least for us) is more typical of our m/m efforts. Great fun!
After reason for m/s over a "more transmitters" category is that our 20M 5/5
stack was only a single 5, with the lower antenna laying on the ground buried
under a foot of snow courtesy of an incapable RingRotator. Still, the Saturday
afternoon run to EU starting in the 17Z hour really brought in the QSOs for few
couple of hours. (At the time I thought we were making a mistake leaving 15M
early, but the decision proved to be the right one.)
10M opened to EU for a while Saturday morning. We were sitting there on the 2nd
radio when the first weak EU appeared out of the SE, so we started S&Ping with
good success. Eventually the opening evolved to straight path, but only lasted
a couple of hours. Overall, 10M proved to be better than expected for the
weekend, and we even worked JA3YBK for a mult in the last hour of the contest.
With only 400 QSOs on 15M at the end of the first day, we knew we had an
opportunity to make hay on Sunday. For most of Sunday it was a 15M single-band
contest with short bursts to 10M or 20M for mults. 15M gave us four straight
100+ hours thru the morning and some JAs at the end.
The last time we did m/s at K8CC was this same contest in 1994, exactly one
decade earlier. This contest, with pretty much the same antenna farm, almost
quadrupled the 1994 score.
We were gratified to see that despite our m/s status, we managed to make K1TTT's
list of top spotters for the weekend. We tried to be democratic about who we
spotted and to not spot the same stations too many times. OTOH, the pileups
induced by packet spots were simply out of control. All three of us agreed that
there were a LOT of stations acting desperate, and would not shut up and
listen.
73,
Dave/K8CC
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