ARRL INTERNATIONAL DX CONTEST CW 2013

DAY1: I started the first contest night on 80m as main band with quite good rates, 160m to making of necessary mults and on 40m with not high chance for good pileup. Low bands was nice opened. I got few nice pileups on 20m and 15m on Saturday afternoon, with only few 10m QSOs digged from the noise. Strong QRN was switching ON/OFF from S1 to S9 in one moment…

DAY2: Low bands conditions were opposite to last night: 160m with 1 QSO, 80m with rare qso from time to time, few pileups on 40m (nice surprise with simple InvVee 🙂 15m was opened early after 20m opening on Saturday afternoon, which gave good base to hope of possible good opening of 10m. And that was true. Few hours of few nice openings to directions of only few US states. I also experienced nice pileup, but major amount of 10m QSOs were S/P.

Mr. Murphy visited me from time to time and caused fault of my ACOM 2000A output relay. Relay protection circuits switched PA to StandBy state due to relay switching timing problem. The longest period of random StandBy switchings took about 1 hour. Fortunately, problem was solved by itself, next random periods were only a short. Unfortunately, problem occured just during QSO…

My main problem was deficit of sleeping. I didn’t sleep a lot before the contest. Family duties didn’t allow me to sleep between 40m closings and 20m openings… 2 hours sleeping during Saturday/Sunday night was not sufficient. So sorry, if my traffic looks like race of deaf snails at the end of the contest.

My station setup misses Low Bands RX antenna, which decrease so useful TopBands mults, and QSOs number on 80m and 40m. Also PA vacuum relay will have to be replaced till next contests in HP category.

So, I broke 1 milion and my feeling is quite good in competition with home stations. My goal is to be competitive with similary equipped stations – DJ5MW (over 3 milions… congrats!), DK7WW or LZ2BE. Lot of precise work waiting for me.

Thanks to all participants!

Final score:   1 132 320
Category:      SO HP ALL
Rank:          WW #86   EU #23   OM #2

Call: OM7RU
Operator(s): OM7RU
Station: OM7RU

Class: SOAB HP
QTH: Dolna Micina
Operating Time (hrs): 38
Location : Northern Europe

Summary:

Band    QSOs  Mults
----------------------------------------
 160:     27   14
 80:     316   39
 40:     388   48
 20:     530   51
 15:     282   44
 10:     169   29
----------------------------------------
 Total: 1712  225  Total Score 1,155,600

Used equipments:
Yaesu FT-1000MP MarkV Field
ACOM 2000A (1,5 kW OUT)
MicroHAM microKeyer, MicroHAM StationMaster
WinTest
UltraBeam UB ONE rotator

Antennas:
160m: Vertical (35m tower + 2 elevated radials)
80m: OptiBeam OB1-80 rotary dipole @34m
40m: InvVee @21m
20, 15, 10m: Cushcraft A4S 3 el. tribander @31m

73!
Riki, OM7RU