#60m British Virgin Isl. worked

 

Took me one minute to work this one. Tnx to PB7Z who messaged me yesterday that this DX was on 60m. Unfortunately have not much time for radio at this moment in life. So this easy DX, new one on 60m, was welcome.

Repairing a CW minipaddle

 Type "CW minipaddle" and choose image at google and you find all kind of minipaddles. I found mine on one of the Chinese web stores on the net. Advertised as Mini Morse Code Key CW dual paddle with magnetic base. When it arrived and tried out I was disappointed because immediately a fault appeared. Touching the paddles the "dot" was alright but the "dash" was hesitating. I couldn't even key my own callsign. So I decided to see what I could do to track down the fault.

Luckily the magnetic base was something separate and not mounted yet. First thing I did was open the housing and spray everything with contact cleaner. It did not improve anything, I had to continue my search.

The construction is quite simple, may be too simple. This is not a begali key, you cannot even compare it :-)

I suspected a bad contact, this is the middle axle. I cleaned it but don't know why because the "dot" did well. I had to search for the fault on the "dash" side.

The contact on the "dash" side. I cleaned it because it did look dirty. You still see kind of a black spot in the center. Everything was mounted together and...... it even got worse. Measuring with the multimeter there was a large resistance when closing the contact. What the....

Next thing I measured was the wire between the contact and the plug to the "radio" key input. I measured a large resistance and when moving the wire it went to zero ohms. There had to be a break in the wire. So I soldered a new wire.

But after I mounted a new wire there was still a lot of resistance between the contact and the plug contact. After all the contact did not make good contact with the solder lug. I made the lug somewhat ticker with solder and pushed the small nut, in which the contact is screwed in, on the solder lug with force. I hot glued both nuts to the surface of the paddles to be sure this will not happen again. 

It was a long search for such a simple device but I finally have a nice mini paddle now which I will use for practice when downstairs in the living room. The nice thing is that it is very quiet and not annoying for others in the room.

I'm not shure if I will put the magnet on. I'm just holding it in my left hand and key with my right fingers. I see a lot of POTA activators doing the same thing.

#CQWPX SSB 2025 contest review

     Last year I was writing in the review of the 2024 WPX that my score of 1 million points that year would be hard to beat....

Contest: CQ WPX SSB 2025

Section: SO ALL LP

Radio: IC-7300 @100W

Antennas: Inverted-V 2x22m, 4 elem. LFA 10m, Gainmaster HW 24-29MHz, Experimental multiband halo V2.0.

Saturday was a slow start. not personally but propagation was just not there or not yet there. It had something to do with that big star that shines on us every day. Not that it kept me from working the DX but it was just not as good as Sunday.

Green=10m, Orange=20m. The rest of the colors are not matching since I worked some on multiple bands.

A lot of operating time was possible this weekend, from the statistics I was on the radio for 33 hours and 22 minutes. Lots of DX has been worked but my most memorable DX was with YJ0CA from Vanuatu. Without the 4 element LFA it would never happen. Imagine you turn your beam to almost north and then you hear a faint voice fading in and out from an exotic island in the Pacific. Then finally the pile up gets quiet and the voice becomes readable. You try and shout your call into the mike and surprisingly the QSO is made. You feel so glorious....this is what DX is all about. 

And this was not the only DX made, I worked lots of DX last weekend. The benefits of this worldwide contest with so many participants. Below a list of the 112 DXCC I worked:

There was no 160m antenna this time. Since I was busy with experimental halo rebuilt I had to remove the 160m inverted-L. By the way, the experimental halo did a really great job on 20m and 15m. It was actually no problem to work all the DX I heard on those bands. The nice thing of course is that it is omnidirectional and so I can work both short-, long- and skewed paths at the same time. The disadvantage is that you cannot turn away from QRM and you don't have that extra gain which a directional antenna has. But overall I did not have any problems with that. 

With the count of QSOs per hour at the left here you could say that Saturday was my better day with a higher amount of QSOs. But that's just because for me it is easy to make large 80m runs. 105 QSO in 1 hour doesn't look bad I think. Sunday had a lot of DX which gave me the big points. No real DX on 80m this year though, didn't hear USA or Canada on that band and can't remember if any were spotted here in Europe?

Most memorable happenings:

- Working a lot of Europe on 10m backscatter Saturday.

- Working YJ0CA Vanuatu on 10m

- Receiving HC8M Galapagos Isl. with 59+20dB on Sunday evening

- Working Regin OY1R again on both 80m/40m

Showing my antennatower again. You don't need to have big antennas and power to work 112 DXCC and 1000 QSOs in one weekend. Just be there, spend a lot of time and keep calling. I write again, like last year, this will be hard to beat. But so far I did beat last years score again. You never know what will happen in the future.