Section: Multi Operator Two Radio High Power
Logger: N1MM+
Station 1: Elecraft K3s 400W
Station 2: Elecraft K3s 400W
Antenna 160m: Inverted-L
Antenna 80m: Inverted-L + dipole
Antenna 40m: 4 square + dipole
Antenna 20m: 2 element SteppIR
Antenna 15m: 4 element yagi
Antenna 10m: 2 element SteppIR
PA6AA team: PB7Z, PA3OES, PD1RP, PA4O, PE4BAS
Support: PA0VAJ, PE1OEU, Feike
This is the long awaited review of the CQWW 2019 as experienced at the PA6AA contestteam. Bernard PB7Z does rent the house for a week now so we have time to build all the antennas. I brought and built the first scaffold already the monday before the contest, this was to support the steppIR. The other antennas were built over the week. We also constructed a 80m 4 square but it never took part in the contest since it was blown away by a storm already at friday evening. We also had large winds at Saturday. Something we know about but still we forget to take it in account...we need only the best hardware to setup everything. So we had a Spiderbeam pole for the 160m inverted-L that performed well, those spiderbeam poles are just way better and can stand large winds. But bad luck continued, we couldn't control the steppIR first day and after some search we tracked it down on a faulty coax and a loose connector. The 15m beam rotor broke as well so we had to turn the beam by hand. But in between we managed to keep 2 stations on air constantly. We started very well with good QSO rate but it didn't go on for the whole contest probabely due to bad propagation. The low bands were also much noisier as last year. But you can't complain much, we had to go on and we did...Some stats: 2688 QSOs, 125 DXCC, ODX: ZM4T (18000km), 6 continents, 37 CQ zones. So, even with these bad conditions (bottom of the solar cycle) we have worked DX around the world.
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| PA6AA map of our contacts (click to enlarge) |
When I arrived at Sunday morning there was not much going on. André PA3OES complained 20m was almost done. He had the idea to check 10m, it was pretty early actually for that band but he saw some spots I guess. Well after we switched over I took over and slowly the 10m became alive. I could work most of Europe and even some Asia and Africa, real magic. The 2 element SteppIR worked very well on that band and I'm glad we had a good antenna for 10. It didn'last forever of course...Unfortunately the QSO rate didn't hold on the low bands in the evening, it was a struggle to get some QSOs and we had the idea even with the power we used we didn't get our signal out. It certainly was not the best effort ever. But after all we almost managed to have as much QSOs as last year. And we had a lot of fun of course....We already think about next year. Better antenna setups, better equipment....better ideas? Well we'll see what next time brings....most important is that we have fun!
3 comments:
What countries outside of Europe did you work on 28 MHz Bas?
Hello John, I checked the log. Here are the results on 10m outside Europe: Africa: Tunisia, Senegal, Morocco, Canary Isl., Cape Verde, Comoros, African Italy, Western Sahara and Namibia. Asia: Israel and Cyprus. Really interesting propagation with booming signals at the contest location. 73, Bas
Interesting Bas. Just goes to show that there are North-South paths open even at the bottom of the sunspot cycle.
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