I think a lot depends on where you were located. I am in southern Maine
about 30 miles from salt water. I did a fair amount of listening for DX
stations. I did not call CQ except for two brief periods late at night.
My impression was that signals were not as good as many recent nights
that I would call "excellent". Many big stations that are 599 on my K3 S
meter on good evenings were hovering around S5 or maybe a bit better.
Other stations that are normally good, were drifting down into my noise
level with QSB. I also noted that many EU stations did not answer me
when I called. After 5 or 6 tries, I would press ALT-W and go on up the
band. That could be the high QRM level in Europe as well as conditions.
I just had the feeling that i was weak on the path to Europe. It
happened all the time. In my listening, I heard many stations farther
south (W4 & W5) calling stations and I was surprised that they could
hear them at all, seeing how weak they were here. I began to think that
something broke here! K1DG was on in Maine from his island in the
middle of salt water, and he seemed to do very well. I don't know what
to say as I do not have the experience to adequately explain what
happened. Maybe if I called CQ for more than 45 minutes total I would
have a different feel for how condx were. My take is that absorption can
be quite variable over a fairly narrow geographical area, say a few
hundred miles.
Dave K1WHS
On 1/29/2020 10:29 AM, Clive GM3POI wrote:
Guy you only have to look at the past results for CQ160 to know that this
year's conditions were not anywhere near as good as 2009. Then I worked
around 700 US stations including all States and 57 St/Prov.
Although last weekend weren't by the recent past bad, and hopefully just a
stepping stone to better in the future. 73 Clive GM3POI
-----Original Message-----
From: Topband [mailto:topband-bounces+clive=gm3poi.com@contesting.com] On
Behalf Of Guy Olinger K2AV
Sent: 29 January 2020 03:11
To: Roger Kennedy
Cc: TopBand List
Subject: Re: Topband: CQ WW Contest
Hi Roger,
Just want to be sure we are both talking about the weekend of 25, 26
January, 2020, the weekend of the 2020 CQ 160 CW contest. If so, I must
register my decidedly firm impression that was the best 160 meter weekend of
my lifetime, what has to be a counterpoint of the amazing 1958 sunspot
maximum.
In the contest I worked 1349 stations including 339 10 pointers (almost all
the 10 pointers were European), let's just say 300+ European stations. In
all of that I worked a 160 meter worked all states (48 CONUS + AK & HI),
plus 9 Canadian provinces, 78 countries ("country" per the contest rules).
That was a claimed score from the southeast USA (decidedly not the
EU-advantaged northeast US) of 752,780.
It was, by an enormous margin, my personal lifetime best for any 160 meter
contest. The antenna did work very well, but, seriously, could not possibly
have accounted for that bump up, nor for sure could my personal operating
skills.
Just think we need to leave room for the idea that maybe the band was a bit
better than "open".
Station here K3 + KPA1500, Inverted L over FCP, no RX antennas (working on
that), NOT a superstation.
Wowser, I wonder if we'll get that again before the sunspots start in
again. I can hope.
73, Guy K2AV
On Tue, Jan 28, 2020 at 3:27 PM Roger Kennedy
<roger@wessexproductions.co.uk>
wrote:
Well conditions were reasonable over the weekend . . .
I spent a total of about 3 hours on the band, and managed to work 48 NA
stations through all the European QRM.
I'm sure I would have worked a lot more, as I heard many others calling
stations that were calling CQ . . . but I'm reluctant to put out a CQ call
in a contest, as I don't want to work hundreds of Europeans (I'm up in the
middle of the night to work some DX !)
As I say, I wouldn't say conditions were particularly good, but the band
was
open.
Roger G3YRO
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