IARU HF World Championship
Call: N8II
Operator(s): N8II
Station: N8II
Class: SOABMixed HP
QTH: WV
Operating Time (hrs): 13.8
Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs Zones HQ Mults
-------------------------------------
160: 17 0 5 3
80: 68 0 9 14
40: 237 166 22 33
20: 337 323 29 41
15: 95 31 17 25
10: 14 2 5 4
-------------------------------------
Total: 1290 87 87 120 Total Score = 782,046
Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club
Comments:
Good news, I hopefully will be uploading this log and all other test logs from
the past 3 years within 10 days to LOTW. Going into this test, I had no
expectations of a serious effort or good score. I took a lot of time off until
19Z to save energy for the good hours to come; some were quite good. DX
propagation overall was poor. I did a pretty good job of being on the hot band
at the right time except searching around on 15 too long when 20 was very
active late morning and afternoon. 20 was not very active at 12Z as usual. I
should have changed bands more often to catch those harder to find zones.
It still takes me a while to wrap my head around what you need to do to succeed
in IARU. The mults are NOT DXCC entities, so you need to focus on catching
openings to different areas on all bands for the zones and working the
multitude of HQ mults the great majority of which are in the Americas and
Europe. When I worked CN8 and 4K9, neither one were mults! It is almost always
fairly slow until EU starts strengthening in our mid afternoon. This year, 15
never really got going well into EU, best conditions to EU were around
1915-2000Z, but activity was very sparse and my CQ's went largely unanswered.
All of my 10M F2 Q's were to the south (some Es to Cuba) and I did not catch
much of any Es. Last year when I really wanted to work the WRTC stations in
Eastern New England, there was almost no Es in that direction which meant
almost no 15 or 20 meter Q's with them. This year, ironically on 15 there was
Es into New England in the 19Z hour and from then until around 23-24Z on 20!
The number of extra Q's that resulted was pretty small without the WRTC
activity, but they would only have been worth one point. Running or chasing
mostly one pointers should of course be a choice of last resort and zone 8 is
huge! By the time 20 really opens well to EU, they are mostly on 40 and lower
already and it was really noticeable by 2230Z along with some limited EU
propagation. I had pretty good EU runs with many NA mixed in on 20 CW in the
20Z hour and SSB in the 21Z hour. Trying to run EU on 20 CW at 2330Z was nearly
fruitless.
The low band prop was not great, but 40 CW was a dream come true for me. The
static noise level was extremely low before and up to about 90 minutes past
sunset. After failing to run well high in the band, I S&P'ed my way down
and found 7022.4 to be very CLEAR! I was able to run quite a few EU mixed with
many of the less desirable zone 8's for quite a while. Some EU moved in a bit,
but I still was running at a decent rate and finally ran out of callers on a
perfectly clear frequency after 200 Q's! I was called by quite a few mults to
the south including deep south SA as well. 80M EU signals were weak, but I was
able to copy quite a few through the relatively low QRN. Other big guns in the
USA were hearing EU I could not copy however. On, 160 I was very lucky, after
tuning the band I was about to QSY, but one more sweep yielded 3 EU HQ stations
that were not readable minutes before.
By 0314Z, I was too tired to S&P a lot and 20 was not in well at all to
AS/EU with only a few SE EU's on CW. So, I tried for the first time to run NA
to the west on SSB and the rate was amazing! My 3rd and 4th callers were easy
copy eastern VK's and many ZL's called in as well with some louder than the
average USA signal. There was Es to 4's in GA and FL, 5's, 9's, and 0's and
many 6's and 7's on F2. At 0337Z, the callers finally stopped (seemed like it
lasted longer than 23 minutes, so I tried 40 SSB for the first time and had an
amazing run there of maybe 20% EU and many west coast stations among loud
signals from call areas 1-4 which lasted until 0438Z which put around 150 Q's
in the log! Many new HQ mults called.
I woke up around 10Z and was back on the air at 1037Z. 40 was in great shape to
the Pacific working one loud ZL and two loud VK's along with KH6's. 20 was
pretty miserable with weak signals from the whole north hemisphere. I did get
called by RI1FJ in zone 75 (bet not too many NA snagged him) and found YB8,
B4HQ, zone 32 and 33, and only one JA = big gun JM7OLW. JA's calling 6Y were
pretty weak. DX0HQ was about S5, but could not hear me. The rate was slooow and
I could not run EU well enough to keep trying on CW.
Many thanks for all of the Q's and your partial reward will be LOTW
confirmations. Everyone in my pile ups seemed to be pretty patient and not
cause QRM for the most part. The causal ops late in the evening/early morning
were a wonderful surprise! Activity from EU compared to a major contest seemed
low and many seemed to neglect 15 and give up too early on 20. 10 has been a
very neglected band all summer and a very poor Es season has not helped. USA
activity seemed good except for the start.
CU down the contest log.
73, Jeff
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