G'day
Most sensible creatures on this Earth fly south when winter comes, but team
VY2ZM do the reverse for the CQ 160 CW. Team leader Jeff K1ZM and
mainstays Peter WW2Y and Rob K2WI at least have the excuse they are only
travelling a little bit north, but in my case I flew all the way from
Perth, Western Australia to join them for the 2004 event.
I guess some would say that being upside-down all the time tends to
scramble the brain.
The day I left it was 39 degrees Celcius in my home town, with a
burning-hot Sun in a clear blue sky. When I reached Charlottetown in Price
Edward Island, it was also 39 degrees (but with a minus prefix before it),
blowing a blizzard and Jeff answered my telephone call to say that I had
arrived with the words "Hi, this is Moscow Airport".
After Jeff had also rounded up Peter and Rob (whose plane had actually been
able to land at Charlottetown - mine gave up about 100 miles west of PEI
and I had been bussed in), we proceeded to a local eatery to fill ourselves
up before facing the long drive/hike to the contest QTH. This proved a
good idea, as Peter and I later ended up hiking a mile across open fields
that night in one to two feet of snow, after the group's ski-doo ended up
burying itself in a serious snow drift.
This also meant Jeff and Rob had to play at being huskies, hauling a sled
with our bags on it several hundred feet through deep snow to reach the
VY2ZM QTH.
The next day, the wind had dropped and the snow had stopped, but there were
drifts up to three feet deep and we still needed to put up one Beverage.
Luckily for me, Jeff had completed most of the antenna preparations earlier
in the week....
On went the ski-suits again and the four of us made short work of the
Beverage, although Jeff had a hard job reaching the terminating resistor
which was buried in a three-foot high snow drift. Usually, at VK6VZ, my
main problem with putting up a Bev' for the CQ 160 is avoiding sunstroke.
Later that day, as we were making the final station arrangements, a search
on the Internet revealed the CQ 160 was likely to feel the effects of a
solar Coronal Mass. However, as we were having so much fun in the snow and
making up stupid phonetics for each other's callsigns, spirits remained high.
After a slow start to the contest and a relative lack of European signals
at a time when they are usually booming in, Team VY2ZM gritted its
collective teeth for the long haul. Stations further to the south seemed
less affected by the poor conditions, but we were still having fun and
Jeff, Peter and Rob were working stuff as fast as the conditions allowed,
with me filling in the odd gap.
At the end of the first night, we had around 300 Europeans in the log - not
bad, but well down from previous years. Propagation for us into the Indian
Ocean/Pacific/Japan had been non-existent. We ate, slept for a while and
psyched ourself up for the second 'run'.
Once again, the European signals tricked through rather than flooded in,
and lots of time was spent seeking out multipliers in order to maximise our
score. The European opening cut out even earlier than the previous night,
making us work hard at compiling USA/VE call areas.
When morning came around, the log looked well-built rather than fat, so we
decided to try and operate during some of the daylight hours in order to
make the best of the time left. As sunset came and went, the European
signals were heard earlier than on the previous two nights - unfortunately,
a amount of QRN and QSB came in with them, making copy very difficult.
However, spirits were still high and we finished the contest laughing - at
our collective desperate attempt to pull one very hard-working and
persistent Italian station out of the 'bangs' and 'pops' of QRN that were
filling the band in PEI. Unfortunately, his callsign was full of 'dits'
and our ears were shot with the QRN.
Our estimated final score was 796,625 points - containing around 950 QSOs,
55 USA/VE sections and 66 DX multipliers. While conditions were poorer
than we hoped, we had much more fun than we thought possible and all vowed
to do the CQ 160 together again.
A special thanks to host Jeff K1ZM, Rob K2WI and Peter WW2Y for letting
this Aussie onto the team and glad you blokes enjoyed the Vegemite.
Vy 73
Steve VK6VZ/VY2
PS VY2ZM was powered by Vegemite sandwiches in the CQ 160 CW 2004
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