Unfortunately this contest is held at an inconvenient time of the year. Propagation on HF at this time of the year is not that good and there is lots of noise all around. Besides that there are many chores in and around the house, mostly garden work and maintenance of the house. So, I didn't want to spend much time in this contest. At saturday I had the radiomarket in Beetsterzwaag and when I came back my sister visited us when she juist arrived back with her camper in the Netherlands after she spend a long time in Hungary. After all that I was tired and didn't want to setup for the contest. Sunday morning I managed to setup N1MM for the WPX CW contest and immidiatly got intimidated by the high speed CW calls. But I managed to make a few QSOs after all. Then other chores needed to be done and I returned late in the afternoon just before dinner. I decided to make it till 75 QSO's after dinner and stopped. Overall propagation was not to good. It was difficult or impossible to hear any cluster spots at all so I went back to tuning by hand, real S&P. DX was rarely heard, most of the contacts were inside Europe. I think it was a good decision to spend limited time at this contest.
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| All the contacts made. After all some DX was workable. |
2 comments:
GM Bas
DX condities waren op zondag beter dan zaterdag op 15 & 10, dus wat dat betreft heb je eigenlijk een goede keuze gemaakt, hi.
We hebben bij OP00HQ op zaterdagmiddag/avond veel problemen gehad op de lage banden door het onweer dat heel langzaam over België trok. Ik was actief op 15m, maar daar stoorde dat ook behoorlijk.
Er was toch behoorlijk wat DX te werken, maar waarschijnlijk was onze antenne daar ook debet aan (2x 6el op 50m hoogte). Heel veel JA kunnen werken tot laat in hun avond. 15m opende pas na 20UTC op zondag naar NA. Het was raar.
73, Martin - PE1EEC
Good morning Bas, yes this is a hard time of the year both season wise for propagation and it's the spring and lots to do around the house. I found the average CW speed in the US around 28 to 30wpm. In the EU much faster at 30wpm up too 38 wpm. I did notice when these faster station made contacts they were asked for serial repeats often. Some of those station programed in N1MM to send the serial slower. In contest were you send your ITU or CQ zone I can go much faster as most contest software prefills this. But when a serial is involved I send slower.
73,
Mike
VE9KK
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