Report on the CQ WPX SSB 2015 Contest

Update 02/09/2015: Well, the final results are out! I am happy to report that I managed to capture #1 South Africa, #1 Africa and #1 World in the category I entered. As it turned out my decision to use 10m was a good one and chasing multipliers rather than lots of QSO's also worked. I think I can safely say that my contest strategy is working!

You can see the certificates (10m QRP unassisted and Tribander Low power) below.

The main 10m QRP single operator unassisted certificate.


The overlay Tribander 10m low power certificate, not sure why they put me in the low power and not QRP?


Contest committee comments as published in CQ Magazine.

Update 11/05/2015: With all the logs now submitted the provisional, unprocessed "raw" log totals have been published. These numbers are published so that everyone can check if their logs are there and if everything looks right.

According to these scored I did well, now I am hoping that my log was reasonable accurate without the time error that I had in the 2014 CQWW CW log. Here are the top 10 scores in the category I competed in as published.

2015 CQ WPX QRP 10 Meters raw scores

ZS6DX.(T).........632,125
YB9KA...............438,306
JH7RTQ............242,252
PU1MHZ.(R).....172,520
LU4VZ...............145,734
WA6FGV...........140,904
YT3TPS............115,236
IZ5JLF...............110,142
I5KAP..................99,792
SP7VTQ..............82,641

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contest report:

This weekend I competed in the 2015 CW WPX SSB contest!

An early, 2am local time start for the CQ WPX SSB contest was not really fun but I was rather excited about the contest so it was worth it!

Ready for action! Before I changed radios...

I was up and running at 2am local time, but it was a very slow start, I could hear US stations on 20m with strong signals but they were calling CQ again and again but never going back to the people calling them! Running 1.5kW but without a decent receiver is a waste of time. After the first hour I had 2 contacts in the log, one on 20m and one on 40m, so I went back to bed....

After a bit of rest I got back to the shack and made the decision to enter only in the single band, 10m category as conditions on the lower bands did not favor SSB QRP operation.

A few hours later 20m and then 15m was a bit better, but still not great with many loud stations with no ears. There were some stations with good ears, mostly outside the USA, including a Mongolian station and quite a few from the middle east. One thing is sure, SSB QRP does not make for a large score...

At 13h00Z, things started  picking up, at least stations could hear me! But I have tried calling CQ with no luck so the QSO rates are low, at this rate I thought I would  be lucky to make 200 contacts! At least I worked a few nice ones like Morocco, Greenland and Mongolia were in the bag for my QRP totals...

The bands were open quite late in the evening but conditions were not great, I struggled for every contact till I eventually gave up after about 8pm. I also decide that I would only start at about 5am the next morning as the first few hours produced very few contacts. 

Day 2 of the CQ WPX SSB contest was a bit better! After a rather slow an uninspiring day yesterday I decide to only concentrate on 10m rather than to jump around all the time chasing a few contacts. In the morning 10m opened up really early, I could hear, and work stations just after 7:30am local time. Signals improved so much that I decided to call CQ at around 8:30am. After a few calls I managed a short run to Europe but my frequency was too close to a strong station. I searched and pounced a while before I found an open spot on 28.513. I started calling CQ and soon I had a nice, if rather unruly, pileup! On a few occasions stations, mostly from Italy, just kept calling while I was busy with a contact, or they tried to hijack a contact by giving me a serial number when the other station was talking and then trying to get me to change the call in the log. Well, that did not work and more than once I told a station they are not, and never will be in my log! I made a list of these stations, ended up with 12, they will be on my "black list" in the future. My "selective DSP hearing" will simply not hear them.... We cannot allow this to happen!  
This pileup kept going for more than an hour before a strong QRO, EU station decided to park almost on top of my. I had fun but I decided it was time for a break, my voice is not used to this!

The rest of the day produced a few short runs, see the stats below, this as well as searching and pouncing eventually got my total QSO's to 603 by the time the 10m band closed. It closed rather early and by 7pm it was all over!

My maximum rates for the contest, not that impressive but I was running QRP


The few runs I had, all on the second day.

Of the 603 contacts I had in the log 555 were on 10m with about 349 WPX multipliers. According to N1MM+ logger this gives me a score ok around 620k, not sure how competitive it is, time well tell...

What worked and what not?

I am happy with N1MM+ logger and the voice keyer, I will be using it again in the future and on CW as well. The one problem I did encounter was that the program would sometimes crash if the radio was switched off and it could not communicate. It was irritating but at least no QSO's were lost.

The headset, radio and foot keyer worked perfectly. Originally I was planning to use the FT-2000 for the contest but the high likelihood of load shedding and the need to run on 12V made me decide to switch to a IC-756. I chose the classic model over the IC-756Pro2/3 because it runs so much cooler for extended use and I had a backup set just in case. It worked ok but when 10m was really open the front-end suffered a bit and it cost me a few contacts. Next time I will rather run the FT-950.

The only problem I had was with an external keyboard, USB, that I had plugged into the logging laptop, in the middle of a pile-up on Sunday it went crazy, locking up the computer and causing the radio to change bands randomly. I am not sure if RF got into it but I do not think so, I was running 5W so that should not be a problem. I unplugged it and all was well, I just had to use the less than convenient keyboard on the laptop for the rest of the contest. I will try a better quality keyboard next time...

One lesson that I learned was the QRP (real QRP, 5W PEP) is not easy on SSB, it was far harder work to get contacts compared to the same power on CW. I also think that in general most CW operators are better behaved than SSB operators so making QRP cantacts are easier. I am looking forward to the CW leg of this contest!  

Home
(c)2015 R Venter