Report on the SARL QRP contest held on 19 July 2014

So today the long awaited SARL QRP contest finally happened! I arrived at my spot with plenty time to spare, only to realize that it was not ideal with too many trees. I ended up not using my normal fan dipole as it would have been difficult to put up. I just threw the end-fed wire over a tree.

Ready to scan the bands with the little FT-817. The LDG is a magic little tuner that helps getting the whole 5W out of the radio.

Station in a backpack.

The antenna, or the location, turned out to be very noisy. I had a S9 noise floor on 40m!

A wire in a tree is not ideal....

The end-fed antenna I build quickly needs to be optimized and also made neater, look at the construction (blush blush)

The station mostly worked well. I can improve on the antenna and the paddle needs a firmer base or a strap to attach it to my leg. The Lipo batteries and battery monitor worked well.

My station on a rock in the "forrest"

I made a few SSB contacts but soon realized that I am not used to shouting CQ so spent most of the 3 hours on CW. I could hear a few stations in the noise I could not work, sorry guys!

I ended with 12 ZS stations in the log, actually 11 as I worked ZS6PTA on CW and SSB. I just missed division 2, worked the rest.

After the first hour I QSY'ed to 15 and 20m, conditions were really poor with most signals S1 or below, at least my noise level was lower here. There was some contest running with lots of Russian stations exchanging RST and IARU zones. It was hard work but I managed to work a few stations, it is always satisfying to work weak DX with QRP from the bush!

I will only know later how I did compared to the other competitors. In total I logged 12 local stations and 18 DX stations, a low total compared to my usual QRP effords but this time I was running a portable field station and conditions were really bad! The DX was mostly Russian but did include 2 Japanese stations and a lonely USA station. A nice capture was EA8ZS (Canary Islands).

I will list the results here once they are available.

Update 06/08/2014: I was happy to see that the results of the SARL QRP contest were released! There was quite a lot of activity on the bands during the contest so it was a bit disappointing that only 8 logs were received and one check log. I suppose most of the other stations were QRO or did not consider their scores to be competitive. I have copied and pasted the results as published by the SARL below.

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The results are as follows:

Home Station

ZS1WWW - Wicus - 12 points

Field Station

ZS6WR - West Rand ARC - 406 points
ZS6PTA - Pretoria ARC - 182 points
ZS4BFN - Bloemfontein ARC - 96 points

Ultra Light portable field station

ZS6DX - Rudi - 1260 points
ZS6A - Pierre - 306 points
ZS5J - John - 204 points
ZS6BNE - 90 points

Check log - ZS2JO - Johannes

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I think the results are quite encouraging for me! I will be spending even more time running QRP in the future and I will be spending time (and money) on improving my QRP station. The two main areas I want to improve on are a better radio (better RX) and better portable antenna. The little Yaesu FT-817 I am using is great but I think I should at least upgrade to the 817ND version, the added DSP filter will help a lot when bands are noisy like during the QRP contest. I might also consider an Elecraft radio....