CQ Worldwide DX Contest, CW
Call: N4TZ/9
Operator(s): N4TZ
Station: N4TZ
Class: SOAB LP
QTH: IN
Operating Time (hrs):
Summary:
Band QSOs Zones Countries
-------------------------------
160: 13 6 8
80: 59 11 32
40: 185 22 70
20: 438 34 103
15: 258 23 88
10: 384 25 91
-------------------------------
Total: 1336 121 392 = 1,940,166
Club/Team: Society of Midwest Contesters
Comments:
The contest started nicely - although 10 and 15 didn't hold up as
long as last year, I compensated by moving to 20 and 40 earlier so
was up about 100 Qs after the first 6 hours, even thought 80m was
noticably less productive than last year. Then things ground to
a halt! Things were so slow that I took an hour off at what
would normally be prime run time for a low power station: 1400z Saturday
morning to catch 40 winks. The bands seemed even worse after the
nap - by the end of the first 24 hours I had about half of last year's
score. Saturday night the lightning was so bad I stopped to turn
on the TV only to find my county was under a tornado watch until
1am local time. I shut down for 3 hours and tried to catch some
shut eye. At 0400z I ventured onto the air again - the weather
conditions seemed better but the propagation was still poor.
Around sunrise Sunday, 1230z, the bands seemed to open up again.
When 10m slowed down around 1730z I went to 15m for one hour, then
it also slowed. My second radio has recently exhibited about 30dB of
deafness, not a problem in Sweepstakes, but a real problem with
weak DX signals. With no other input from the outside world, I feared
a repeat of Saturday, so retreated to 20m for the remainder of the
contest.
Last year I lost all of Sunday afternoon to TRLog crashing and
not being able to restart it on either of two computers. [The
documentation of TRLog has since been updated to reflect the
problem.] The loss of more than six hours of good operating time
last year was almost exactly offset by this year's loss of good
operating conditions. My claimed score is up about 70k points,
primarily due to increased mults found on my extended 20m time.
This year I was able to turn more of the antennas on my single
tower, which undoubtedly helped in the wierd propagation conditions.
For example, Sunday afternoon I kept the lower 20m on the TIC
ring pointed to Europe and the top 20m pointed SE to catch
the zone 8 & 9 stations, but also got a YB and JA to call in
long path.
The contest was a real emotional roller coaster - delight, despair,
discouragement, disgust and determination - certainly well worth
the price of admission.
Station description:
Two TenTec OMNI VI+s, 100 watts PEP output into 400 feet of coax to
homebrew sixpack at base of tower.
My single (fully-loaded) tower now sports the following antennas:
40 - 402-CD @ 120'(interlaced with 20m)
402-CD @ 62' fixed on EU (interlaced with 20m) on ring rotor
20 - 5el, 48' boom @ 120' (40 interlaced on this boom)
5el, 48' boom @ 62' fixed on EU (40 interlaced on this boom)
15 - 5el @ 130',5el @ 99' and 45' on ring rotors, 5el @ 75' fixed on EU
10 - 5el yagis interlaced on all 15 meter antennas
80 - 4 square
160 - 75' high inverted L
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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