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.
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| 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.
