CQWW WPX Contest, CW
Call: CR2X
Operator(s): OH6KZP
Station: CR2X
Class: SOAB HP
QTH: Ribeira Grande
Operating Time (hrs): 36
Radios: SO2R
Summary:
Band QSOs
------------
160: 5
80: 269
40: 1205
20: 1525
15: 1172
10: 100
------------
Total: 4276 Prefixes = 1194 Total Score = 13,967,412
Club: Contest Club Finland
Comments:
This contest marked my fifth visit to the fabulous island of São Miguel, backed
by other members of the Radio Arcala team. The CR2X project officially ended
with ARRL SSB this March, but since any dismantling has yet to be done, it was
possible to run WPX CW as an "encore" to our M/M team effort in
March.
I arrived at noon on Wednesday, with Martti OH2BH having arrived the previous
day to mark another destination on his world tour of "retro DXing".
We were greeted by an ominous sight at the station, as the base of one tower
had partly crumbled, leaving the tower leaning by a "healthy" few
degrees (just waiting for the next storm to deliver the death blow...), and the
rotating tower was missing a guy wire. Heavy winds on Wednesday and Thursday
also slowed down our antenna preparation work, leading to a pretty worrisome
outlook.
In any case, we managed to fix the guy wire issue on Thursday, and fortunately
our friends José CU2CE, Francisco CU2DX, Bruno CS8ABG, and their resources
were able to straighten and secure the second tower on Friday, finalizing it
during the contest on Saturday. Francisco also kindly loaned an amplifier, as
it seemed that the main amplifier we had brought for the second radio wasn't
performing as expected. We also repaired the direction indicator of the
rotating tower, and installed the NA and EU beverages prepared by Pertti OH2PM,
and a 160m sloping dipole in keeping with the importance of the low bands in
WPX.
Running up and down the hill and changing sweaty T-shirts from morning until
evening, seeing one part of the planned pre-contest schedule fail after
another, and worrying over how things and I were going to hold up, left me both
physically and mentally exhausted by Friday afternoon. So when the farmers
appeared at 17z, requesting the removal of a beverage part for some time so
they could spread fertilizer on the hilly field, I was ready to throw in the
towel. Thank heavens that one has to be QRT for 12 hours of this 48-hour
race....! My apologies especially to those who suffered from my deteriorating
CW copying skills by Sunday morning, probably thinking an idiot must be manning
the station's cockpit :)
High-band signals from the USA and Canada were pretty good except for brief
periods in the afternoon when things died down a little. Even 10m showed minor
life over the pond. I divided my off-time so that I could try the difficult
morning JA path on 15m for the all-important prefixes, but unfortunately
signals were very weak. In any case, together with 20m I managed to reel in 27
Japanese prefix multipliers, which is about half of what I was aiming for. The
biggest problem on the high bands was QRN-related, with intermittent periods of
several noisy minutes killing all but the strongest signals on all bands
especially on Sunday.
The low bands worked well, and even the 80m remnant antenna was in good shape
thanks to the rescue operation by Toni OH2UA and Juha OH8NC just after the ARRL
SSB contest. I was especially happy with having gone through the effort of
installing the EU/NA beverages, as they provided considerable help on the noisy
bands. I made only 5 QSOs on 160m, quickly realizing that it was pretty
pointless to be there even with the second radio. But at least I had to prove
to myself that we didn't erect the antenna in vain ;)
Thanks to the efforts of all involved, I feel grateful in claiming the European
SOAB HP record for the Radio Arcala team. A personal goal also became reality:
simultaneously holding/claiming the four most significant European SOAB HP
records in the CQ contest family (CQWW/WPX CW/SSB), which is something I didn't
dare dream of.
Due to a callsign-specific parser/scoring bug with the logging software I
wasn't sure of the exact score during the contest, and thus the cqcontest.net
live score didn't reflect the up-to-date situation either. However, periodic
checks by exporting/importing the Cabrillo to another software gave me an idea
of the "delta" to reality and the target score.
I would especially like to thank Martti OH2BH (who worked SOSB80 from another
station) for all his support during this trip and otherwise, and other members
of the Radio Arcala team. As noted above, our local friends José CU2CE,
Francisco CU2DX, and Bruno CS8ABG with their resources provided invaluable help
for which I am very grateful. Fixing and preparing the station tends to eat up
most of the pre-/post-contest time on the island, so it was really nice to
still see them briefly. Thanks also to Dave K1ZZ@CU4DX for the local Azorean
competition!
Some statistics below.
73
Kim OH6KZP
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Cabrillo Statistics (Version 10g) by K5KA & N6TV
http://bit.ly/cabstat
CONTEST: CQ-WPX-CW
CALLSIGN: CR2X
CATEGORY-OPERATOR: SINGLE-OP
CATEGORY-TRANSMITTER: ONE
OPERATORS: OH6KZP
-------------- Q S O R a t e S u m m a r y ---------------------
Hour 160 80 40 20 15 10 Rate Total Pct
--------------------------------------------------------------------
0000 0 0 92 94 0 0 186 186 4.3
0100 0 0 115 56 0 0 171 357 8.3
0200 0 33 104 20 0 0 157 514 12.0
0300 0 33 84 12 0 0 129 643 15.0
0400 0 10 100 18 1 0 129 772 18.1
0500 0 28 95 0 0 0 123 895 20.9
0600 0 15 82 0 1 0 98 993 23.2
0700 0 0 25 0 3 0 28 1021 23.9
0800 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1021 23.9
0900 0 0 0 22 59 0 81 1102 25.8
1000 0 0 0 0 35 0 35 1137 26.6
1100 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1137 26.6
1200 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1137 26.6
1300 0 0 0 10 78 0 88 1225 28.6
1400 0 0 0 43 84 6 133 1358 31.8
1500 0 0 0 100 57 0 157 1515 35.4
1600 0 0 0 57 83 17 157 1672 39.1
1700 0 0 0 93 59 0 152 1824 42.7
1800 0 0 0 98 28 0 126 1950 45.6
1900 0 0 0 84 57 0 141 2091 48.9
2000 0 0 0 101 22 1 124 2215 51.8
2100 4 0 24 100 5 0 133 2348 54.9
2200 0 12 10 97 11 0 130 2478 58.0
2300 0 18 38 58 8 0 122 2600 60.8
0000 0 47 36 29 9 0 121 2721 63.6
0100 0 0 38 36 19 0 93 2814 65.8
0200 0 12 22 55 0 0 89 2903 67.9
0300 0 0 71 20 0 0 91 2994 70.0
0400 0 30 69 5 0 0 104 3098 72.5
0500 0 27 45 0 0 0 72 3170 74.1
0600 0 3 25 0 0 0 28 3198 74.8
0700 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3198 74.8
0800 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3198 74.8
0900 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3198 74.8
1000 0 0 0 19 28 0 47 3245 75.9
1100 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3245 75.9
1200 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3245 75.9
1300 0 0 0 2 44 15 61 3306 77.3
1400 0 0 0 14 48 11 73 3379 79.0
1500 0 0 0 15 59 20 94 3473 81.2
1600 0 0 0 24 48 28 100 3573 83.6
1700 0 0 0 54 53 0 107 3680 86.1
1800 0 0 0 38 35 0 73 3753 87.8
1900 0 0 0 82 26 0 108 3861 90.3
2000 0 0 0 41 73 0 114 3975 93.0
2100 1 1 60 27 7 0 96 4071 95.2
2200 0 0 33 1 75 2 111 4182 97.8
2300 0 0 37 0 57 0 94 4276 100.0
------------------------------------------------------
Total 5 269 1205 1525 1172 100 4276
Gross QSOs=4338 Dupes=62 Net QSOs=4276
Unique callsigns worked = 2975
The best 60 minute rate was 197/hour from 0012 to 0111
The best 30 minute rate was 204/hour from 0007 to 0036
The best 10 minute rate was 252/hour from 0011 to 0020
The best 1 minute rates were:
7 QSOs/minute 1 times.
6 QSOs/minute 2 times.
5 QSOs/minute 27 times.
4 QSOs/minute 146 times.
3 QSOs/minute 506 times.
2 QSOs/minute 732 times.
1 QSOs/minute 556 times.
There were 1567 bandchanges and 875 (20.5%) probable 2nd radio QSOs.
Number of letters in callsigns
Letters # worked
-----------------
3 22
4 1847
5 1597
6 762
7 22
8 13
9 10
10 3
Multi-band QSOs
---------------
1 bands 2089
2 bands 553
3 bands 260
4 bands 65
5 bands 7
6 bands 1
The following stations were worked on 6 bands:
OL4A
------- S i n g l e B a n d Q S O s ------
Band 160 80 40 20 15 10
----------------------------------------------
QSOs 4 102 560 815 562 46
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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