In the footsteps of G3FXB - CQWW CW 1997 - Single-Band 20m
Having operated single-band 160 in CQWW CW for the past few years, I decided it was time to try something different. Some years ago I had bought a (very) secondhand Hy-Gain 204BA, but had never used it, so it seemed like a good opportunity to rectify the omission.
I’ve used monobanders before, though not from home but, having got it in the air on the Friday morning before the contest, my impressions were very favourable. There was plenty of pre-contest activity, and I was easily able to work everything I called, including SU1GS on RTTY through a sizeable pile-up (and there’s nothing subtle about RTTY - brute force and ignorance works every time!).
As it turned out, 20 was rather disappointing. Band openings coincided closely with what were apparently some good openings on 15 metres, so activity was relatively sparse, and high rates were rare. There was little or nothing on the band between about 0000 and 0500 on both days, and openings to the US were relatively short, though the Sunday certainly brought some good propagation to the West Coast, as well as a large number of KL7s! But there were some nice highlights, for example during a long-path run to Japan being called by JR0BQD/JD1 on Ogasawara and, later that day, being called by UA0YAY in zone 23.
My final tally was 502k points from 1579 QSOs (3261 QSO points), 120c, 34z. Well short of G3FXB’s 1988 UK record of over 700k, but perhaps not too bad considering 20m conditions. And I came away with the feeling that the 204BA puts out a substantially better signal than my TH5, with a cleaner pattern.