First time full time SSB High Power participation at WPX contest.
This time was the contest more about CQ than about WPX or even DX.
Start of the contest showed me prediction for next 48 hours. Closed bands without preface pileup, many more or less wide splettered signals. 10m was closed, 15m only for Middle East and South America mults. 20m was without good antennas only the place for S/P. 40m and 80m were base bands, and 160m only as EU playground. The CQ produced low rates. Saturday CQs produced so-so rates between 40-80 Q/h, so there was better to S/P during Sunday.
Conditions were really strange. I got often „59 big signal“ info from any part of the world, together with callsign calling without answer from the same location few kHz beside… Spletters were everywhere, sometimes I had problem to set all filters back to default positions after hard digging of QSO covered by spletters. Bands looked full, but with a lot of inbands, which start to be one of the reason of difficulties of find clear frequency.
The only one 20m pileup was interrupted by my antivirus software, it started to upgrade and stopped other applications… I lost frequency and cca 20 minutes traffic during killing of the upgrade process 🙁
HW worked fine, except Mr. Murphy visit: During pre-starting control hour on Friday evening I found deaf 160m antenna. Problem was fortunately only routine: disconnected feedline-to-tower wire, solved during Saturday break.
And just one „wonder“: on 80m I heard somebody to announce to 9A.. STN, that he breaks the rules, because of parallel transmition. 9A.. told, that he don’t use 2nd radio. Few minutes later I walked S/P through 160m and during waiting for CQ STN callsign I suddenly heard „OM7RU, we have QSO B4″…
Thanks to all participants, for patience during QSOs inside splatter pauses.
Final score: 1 602 644 Category: SO AB HP Rank: WW #88 EU #31 OM #1
Call: OM7RU
Operator(s): OM7RU
Station: OM7RU
Class: SOAB HP
QTH: Dolna Micina
Operating Time (hrs): 35:57
Location : Northern Europe
Summary:
Band QSOs -------------------------------------------------- 160: 107 80: 400 40: 443 20: 221 15: 30 10: 0 -------------------------------------------------- Total: 1201 Prefixes: 601 Total Score: 1,658,760
Club: Dozen Dashes Contest Club
Used equipments:
Yaesu FT-1000MP MarkV Field
ACOM 2000A
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
www.tucek.sk/om7ru