IARU HF World Championship
Call: 7J1AAI
Operator(s): W1NN
Station: JH1GTV
Class: SO CW HP
QTH: Koganei City, Tokyo
Operating Time (hrs): 14
Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs Mults
---------------------------
160:
80:
40:
20: 310 49
15: 299 49
10: 49 17
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Total: 658 0 115 Total Score = 332,115
Club:
Comments:
This was a part-time effort from the JH1GTV station in Tokyo`s western suburbs.
Shige presently has no low-band antennas, so it didn?ft seem to make sense to do
an all-out effort. I operated most of the first 15 hours and quit at mid-day on
Sunday with 9 hours to go in the contest. It was fun to watch the score updates
on the WRTC2002 website after I got back to my downtown apartment, but rather
disappointing to find out later that there were some major mistakes in the top
scores shown on the website. I suppose we?fll find out later what the problem
was. Still, the organizers deserve a lot of credit for developing this cool new
operating and spectator tool. 23 Hourly updates for 52 stations amounts to
nearly 1,200 pieces of data, so this was a major undertaking. I?fm sure this
will eventually become normal contesting technology, not just for the WRTC but
for all contests.
The IARU starts at 9 PM local time on Saturday night in Japan. Not the most
convenient of starting times, but at least you can go to sleep right after the
contest and get up at the normal time Monday morning, so in this sense it?fs
better for the JA contesters than the 48-hour contests that end at 9 AM Monday
morning. Speaking of JA contesters, it didn?ft seem to me that there were very
many JA?fs seriously operating this event, at least on CW. The serious
under-representation of Japan in Finland probably didn?ft do much to stir up
interest in the event here.
Basically the bands were pretty good for summer, which means they were not very
good, but conditions could have been a lot worse. Ten was pretty awful but I
did manage to work R3HQ and W1AW/5 in addition to a handful of west coast
stations plus a lot of Asian/Pacific mults. Frequent QSY?fs paid off.
15 and 20 were pretty weird at times, with both NA and EU coming in at the same
time. Some EU stations were workable in the early morning on 15, which is
pretty unusual in my experience. 15 stayed open until around 3 AM local and
then opened up again around 5 AM, so no complaints there. 20 was open the whole
time but was pretty useless Sunday morning. There were a lot of very weak EU
stations calling and it was not always easy to pull these guys through,
especially with Tokyo?fs high noise level. There didn?ft seem to be much US
East Coast activity. I guess a lot of the guys you normally work in these
contests were in Finland. It was hard to get a sustained run of US East Coast
stations going at any time. I worked very few twos, threes, fours and eights on
either band.
I managed to pick up 31 of the OJ?fs, mostly on 20. I spent a lot of time
searching and had hopes of finding all 52 on CW, but it was not to be. I
probably missed the best time to work them on 15, which should have been late
afternoon/early evening Japan time (0700-1300Z), so it should have been possible
to get the sweep on CW from Japan with a full effort. A couple of the OJ?fs
were close to S9 for short periods of times, but usually they were quite weak,
running the US probably with their antennas pointed well away from Japan. But
it was usually pretty easy to get through the pileup just by dropping my call in
at 44 wpm slightly off frequency. These ops know what they?fre doing!
Congratulations to the organizers and participants for a great show. It?fs a
privilege to be able to participate in ham radio?fs greatest event, even from
afar.
73,
Hal 7J1AAI (aka W1NN)
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.hornucopia.com/3830score/
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