2003 ARRL DX SSB
1-2/03/2003
I was not really planning on spending a lot of time on the air during the contest. I prefer CW contests and not being able to work all the great DX, only NA stations during this contest can be rather frustrating.
As it turned out I only switched on the radio Sunday afternoon to give away a few points. After working all the normal stations and QSY'ing up and down the bands I decided to call CQ for a while on 10m. WELL, a couple of hours later when I had to shut down to do something else I had hundreds of Q's in the log and an average hourly rate of just over 240 !, GREAT fun but the poor old voice....
I had so much fun that I have now decided to have a more serious go at the coming CQ WPX SSB contest ! I must just make a plan and get a voice keyer going, I will never survive 48 hours of calling....
I was only running 100w into a 4 element tri-bander in this contest as conditions were great but for the WPX contest I think I will give the amp some work as well, when you try and hang on to a CQ frequency you need the extra few DB !. This was also the first time I used the IC-746 in a contest, it was ok but when things got a bit busy I could have used a narrower SSB filter, maybe a 1.8khz but the PBT did help. During the contest I ended up trying various different radios to compare performance. The results were interesting with some of the older radios, like the FT-767GX doing VERY well !. Doing this during a not so serious contest is good so you can get to now your equipment and decide on the best combination for the next contest.
So thanks to all the great operators, I had lots of fun and hope to see you in the next big one, just listen out for the pileup :-)