I had the exact same experience here!
In S&P 90% of the time a single call to a CQing station and I'd have him
and logged, Wham-Bam done,
I was playing on 10 meters only, and the band seemed pretty good.
But finding a hole and trying for a run was totally fruitless, and this
mode of contesting is typically 50% of my typical mode. But this time I
bet it ended up less than 10% if it was that high. I started that way,
and thought there was something wrong with my station, but then when one
call would work CQing stations, it was obvious I was getting out well.
Very Strange.
Joe WB9SBD
Sig
The Original Rolling Ball Clock
Idle Tyme
Idle-Tyme.com
http://www.idle-tyme.com
On 5/27/2013 10:21 PM, Hank Greeb wrote:
I had a terrible time trying to make a "run" when I tried now and then
during the recent CQ WPX contest. I'd call CQ for as long as 10
minutes, and only once did I get more than one or two contacts in a
row from trying to "run." I figured that propagation was weird, but
couldn't figure out what the deal was.
After the fact I searched for my call in the past 24 hours, and found
that I had rarely been heard calling CQ by any of the skimmers on the
Reverse Beacon Network, and even more rarely was I more than 10 dB
above ambient noise. I've had considerably better results in other
recent contest efforts. On a typical day, if no contest is in
progress, I can call CQ two or three times in a minute, and I'd be
heard by numerous skimmers, with my poorer home location.
I figured that the skimmers must have been overloaded, or the fact
that thousands of folks were calling CQ was overloading their capacity
to dig down for the weaker stations.
In comparing my results, hour over hour compared to last year, I made
"about" the same number of Q's per hour - >99.44% of the S&P, so it
would appear that, even with lousy ionospheric conditions, I was able
to S&P with similar effectiveness. Last year, at home, with just a low
wire antenna, I didn't even try "running" so I don't know if I was
being heard by the skimmers.
Is it possible that the sheer number of signals on the air make the
skimmers less sensitive? Or is my thinking all wrong?
72/73 de n8xx Hg
QRP >99.44% of the time
Operated WQ8RP during CQ WPX 2013
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