CQ 160-Meter Contest, CW - 2020
Call: PJ2T
Operator(s): K8ND W8WTS
Station: PJ2T
Class: Multi-Op HP
QTH: Curacao
Operating Time (hrs): 27:07
Summary:
Total: QSOs = 1528 State/Prov = 57 Countries = 85 Total Score = 2,154,424
Club: Mad River Radio Club
Comments:
Congratulations to IG9/S59A, CR3W, P40AA, and all of the other category winners
for great results in a fun contest. All of the competitors, especially the
Europeans, are inching the bar higher and higher every year.
For the eleventh year, PJ2T was operated in the multiop, high power category by
Jeff, K8ND and Jim, W8WTS. Jeff and I have been operating together for many
years, always pushing each other to send louder and listen harder on top band.
Conditions were well above average this year, allowing us to score our second
highest finish in this contest.
Improvements and maintenance never end at a world class contest station located
3500 km from home. Jeff arrived the weekend before the contest, checking the
antennas and equipment, making to-do lists, and staging the tools, parts and
materials needed for upgrades and repairs. Jeff found very few breakdowns or
problems at the station. The most serious was a broken beverage due to some
construction in the area. I arrived on Tuesday before the contest. Jeff and I
started outdoor work on Wednesday. All things considered, there was very little
outdoor repair needed. The beverage was easy to splice back together, so we
started down the lists.
Some of our receiving antennas are set up temporarily for contests and brought
in afterward to thwart theft and to keep them in like-new condition. We have
deployed our DX Engineering active four square receiving antenna so many times
that it takes little time and almost no effort. The antennas and parts seem to
know where to go. This year, we made five movable bases for the antennas out of
paint cans, rebar and concrete, so that we can fine tune the orientation of the
four square. We use a Brunton pocket transit to accurately set the directions
for the elements. There is a run along the edge of the water where we used to
have a permanent beverage pointed toward USA and JA (both are in the same
direction from Curacao), but the antenna was removed to make room for some
construction down the road from the station. That beverage location always
yielded good performance, so we installed a temporary 268m beverage along the
edge of the cliff above the water.
After dark, we worked on our setup of five separate CW Skimmers, each fed from a
different receive antenna via various combinations of active receive antenna
multicouplers and magic T splitters. We use two powerful Dell Precision mobile
workstations to run the five instances of CW Skimmer software and a local DX
Cluster node server to aggregate the spot streams, filter the spots and deliver
them over the station LAN to the logging computers. We made QSOs to verify
operation of everything. I operated in the CWOps Mini-test on Wednesday evening
and the NCCC Sprint on Thursday evening to help find bugs in the station and
because they are both very fun contests. By Friday, all of the SDRs, antennas,
computers and software were running great. We set up the log template and
relaxed prior to the contest start.
At 2200Z, CQWW 160 starts in full daylight at PJ2T. The first hour is always a
slog, where we work all of the big USA stations in the first few minutes then
listen to the Europeans, who have been in darkness for two hours, feed on each
other like a tank of piranhas. The USA stations are listening for a bite at
Europe, so no one is listening in PJ2T’s direction. After the first hour, we
logged only 23 QSOs and 18 multipliers.
The pace picked up in the second hour as the sun started setting, having 93 QSOs
and 40 multipliers at 0000Z. Signals were good the first night, but not
excellent. We noted rapid QSB that made callsigns difficult to get on the first
try. We worked our JAs the first night approaching local sunrise. We ended the
first night with 950 QSOs and 123 multipliers.
We started the second night at 2200 Z, with a predictably weak first hour in
full daylight. As the band opened up the second night, signals from both NA and
Europe were clean and solid. We were able to beat our QSO goals for 8 hours the
second night. The last QSO on Sunday morning was at 1154Z with W6UB. Sunday
afternoon was spent storing some of our receive antennas and picking up after
the contest furor. There is very little to work during the last hours of the
contest, but we were on the air calling just in case the odd Caribbean station
showed up. We did manage to work 1 station (KP4TG) in the final hours of the
contest.
It appears that we have the top score in North America and South America. Those
Europeans are very hard to beat when they step over into Africa or Asia.
Nonetheless, it was a very fun contest with the second night providing some of
the best conditions in recent memory. We thank everyone for their QSOs and are
already looking forward to next year.
Very 73,
Jim, W8WTS and Jeff, K8ND
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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