CQ Worldwide DX Contest, CW
Call: 8P5A
Operator(s): W2SC
Station: 8P5A
Class: SOAB HP
QTH: Barbados
Operating Time (hrs): 46.5
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
Band QSOs Zones Countries
------------------------------
160: 330 17 46
80: 714 22 77
40: 1234 30 101
20: 1542 33 95
15: 1555 30 96
10: 2007 28 95
------------------------------
Total: 7382 160 510 Total Score = 12,439,890
Club: Northern California Contest Club
Comments:
Sunspots do exist! I was beginning to think they were an urban legend
propagated by the old timers.
Once again, I had to work CQWW around family commitments in New Jersey for
Thanksgiving. While we did not go to an NFL game on Thanksgiving night like we
did last year, this year had its own excitement. On the Sunday before
Thanksgiving, we watched my older daughter run the Philadelphia Marathon, her
first. From there I flew to Barbados to set up for the contest. Due to my
wife contracting pneumonia joining me on a business trip to VU and 9V, I had to
pass on CQWW SSB (no good deed goes unpunished) and there was more to set up on
this trip. In addition, there was a lightning strike while I was gone, and I
had to diagnose and repair the damage. Evidently the electrician told the home
owner that, had it been a wooden house, it would have burned down. Eventually I
got everything working, but it took a full effort working alone.
I flew back up to New York on Wednesday evening and spent the holiday with
Kathleen's family and our kids. Thanksgiving night, I returned to a hotel at
JFK for an early flight in the morning by myself. I arrived at the station
about 19Z to do a full check out, which took about an hour. From there it was
back to the house for a bit of rest and then back to the station. It got no
better after the contest as I left Tuesday at 6:15 AM for several days of
business in Canada.
With all the precontest travel and lack of rest/preparation, I resign myself to
not being competitive and doing the contest for fun. Nonetheless, once the
contest starts I try to go all out. Unlike prior years, this one was more of a
struggle. I felt mentally tired early on and I really battled with the pileups
on Sunday. The combination of the K3 AGC and the deep pileups made the day a
struggle.
Overall, I was suprised by 80 and 160. I was expecting them to diminish with
the return of the sunspots, but they were better than expected. The first
night, I knew I needed to get to 40, but they kept calling on 160. What proved
difficult was using the second radio. Others have stated that the second radio
is still usable up to about 180 per hour. In fact, I have worked 10 second
radio Q's in 200+ hours in the past. However, this is when there is one caller
at a time and a 200 hour still has a lot of CQ's. When you are doing 180-200 in
a roaring pileup, it is much harder to listen on the other radio. As a result,
I did more tuning for mults than I have done in the past. I also should have
moved more guys the first night. A few Caribbean stations that made over 6000
Q's were only worked once as a result.
Unfortunately, we had bad weather again. A bad storm on Saturday tore the tarp
canopy I put in front of the doors to the shack, entirely off the house. It
also blew down part of my recieve 4 square and produced two power outages
during daylight hours. The 4 square repair and the outages cost me about an
hour.
Overall, despite the travel, the setbacks, and struggles on Sunday, it was
great fun and a personal best score in this contest. Outside of some erratic
keying from Writelog, the station performed flawlessly.
One thing that I enjoy as much as operating is working on engineering station
automation. I have custom beam positioning, a custom wattmeter, and a master
control box that does all the filter selection, band selection, and SO2R
support. Embedded in it are two W5XD keyers. There is a processor inside and
a serial port that speaks to a monitoring app on the PC. W5XD added new
functionality to Writelog to send custom commands to a radio over a serial
port. I used that functionality to speak to the monitoring app, which then
spoke to the control box. The net is that I could switch between three
antennas per band, select the RX antenna, and select the direction of the RX
antenna directly from the keyboard. I did not touch the rack of toggle
switches all weekend. It worked prefectly, very cool
Thanks to everybody for the Q's and the moves
QSL via NN1N or LoTW
Happy 45th anniversary of Barbados independence
73, Tom W2SC
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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