CQ Worldwide DX Contest, SSB
Call: 3B8HA
Operator(s): G0CKV
Station: 3B8HA
Class: SOAB LP
QTH:
Operating Time (hrs): 15
Summary:
Band QSOs Zones Countries
------------------------------
160:
80:
40:
20: 147 26 61
15: 45 19 33
10: 149 18 59
------------------------------
Total: 341 63 153 Total Score = 210,816
Club: Wey Valley Amateur Radio Group
Comments:
Except for a one-off foray into the deep forests of OH-land a few years ago this
was my first CQWWSSB since the 1960s(!). For our traditional family vacation in
3B8 I negotiated permission from the hotel to put up some discrete antennas and
from the XYL to bring some radio gear. It was always going to be a low-key
affair but a high noise level at the hotel killed 40m entirely and made the
thought of running on any band a non-starter. With parallel vertical dipoles
for 10/15 and a quarter-wave vertical with two elevated radials for 20 close to
the beach (10-15m away and 4-5m above with the help of a coconut palm tree) I
tried to get the antennas as far away from the building as possible and daytime
noise was down to S3 on 10 and S5 on 15 and 20. Dusk and the external lighting
on the grounds added two S-units of noise during the dark hours until after
sunrise.
My real interest in this was at any rate not to run pileups. I have little
experience from operating from the tropics so I saw this as a learning
opportunity. The high solar flux and the X-ray events made propagation quite
educational. I am still trying to reconcile what I heard and when with what
VOACAP was trying to tell me. 20m behaved as expected more or less like 80 in
northern European summer-time, totally dead during the day. 15 was not much
better daytime. I was surprised how late 15/10 opened in the morning but then
my little wires were not in a good location for NE/E.
Trying my KPA500 I produced interesting sound effects in one of the hotel
restaurants close to my antennas - I thought it sounded better than the canned
music they were playing but my opinion is of course biased. Prudence thus kept
this to a LP effort and even lower-key than originally planned.
The big surprise was 20m after midnight GMT - US stations were many and strong
and even my puny signals seemed to do well. My antenna modelling suggests that
my verticals away from and above the sea should do very well at extreme low
angles towards the NW from here so it does make some sense. EU and most other
signals were generally weak but then of course 3B8 is off the back and side of
beams from almost all locations in this world except possibly for NA beaming
EU. Loads of stations missed 3B8 and perhaps zone 39 because they were too
comfortable running easy pile-ups rather than digging me out. Some of the
smarter/big gun operators QSY'd me around 10-15-20 with great success. I have
never had such a high proportion of QSYs in my log before.
It was great to work so many of the WRTC organizers and participants. Listening
to my WRTC team-mate Mark M0DXR running extremely fast as P3F was music to my
ears.
I will continue to play for an hour or so per day from this 3B8 location (CW of
course), then continue the adventure from 3B9 for a week before getting back to
another location on 3B8 for CQWWCW disguised as 3B8MU and for that a few
friends will join. The plan is a more committed effort on CW, hopefully on all
bands. But it is all a bit of a gamble - we don't know if that location also
will be noisy, nor do we know how easy it would be to site some simple antennas
there. We will however have fun and we will enjoy Mauritius.
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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