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GU6UW - CQWW CW 1998, Single-op All-Band

One of life's big decisions comes round annually - what to do for the CQWW CW Contest? After several years of single-band entries from home I felt an all-band effort coming on, but I was also conscious that to do so from home would be far from ideal. There is always the risk of TVI, along with distractions from the family, and my limited station would be no match against the likes of GI0KOW and G4BUO (who took first and second places in Europe in 1997).

After looking into various alternatives, I very quickly settled on Guernsey. A group of us had operated CQWW Phone from the Guernsey ARS (GARS) station in 1990, receiving a very warm welcome from the locals, GARS has a well-appointed shack and 60ft tower in a good location and I would almost certainly be the only serious entry from that DXCC country. An English group had expressed interest in operating from there in the contest, but this had fallen through, and my approach to GARS received an enthusiastic response (along with a request to show the 9M0C slides at the Friday evening club meeting, which I was very happy to do).

In the 1990 CW event I had operated single-op all-band from Jersey, travelling over on the Thursday night, with just Friday to put up antennas, which had left me exhausted even before the contest started, so I was determined not to let that happen again. Fortunately my work commitments allowed me to travel out on the Wednesday before the contest, by way of the Condor SeaCat (a 40 knot catamaran ferry) from Poole, which takes just under 3 hours to reach Guernsey.

Phil GU0SUP, GARS Chairman had kindly taken a few days off work to help me set up, which proved invaluable. GARS has a TH-6 which we needed to assemble on the tower in place of the 3-element tribander which was already there. They don't leave the TH-6 up permanently as Guernsey is subject to very high winds, and the wind force on the TH-6 had previously stripped the gears of the club rotator.

The club also has dipoles for 160, 80 and 40, and we strung these from the tower. All worked first time, which is always an encouraging sign! Then there was my "secret weapon". After our success on 40m at 9M0C, using a four-square array, I had borrowed this antenna and set it up in the field adjacent to the club shack.

One of the pleasant aspects of a trip like this is spending time with the locals. Wednesday evening I was invited to the home of Bob GU4YOX, and Thursday evening enjoyed a dinner with GU0SUP, GU4YOX, GU4EON and GU1JFA. On the Friday I managed a short sleep in the afternoon, after shopping for supplies for the weekend, and then met several more of the GARS members at their club meeting, when I showed the 9M0C slides. Incidentally, GU4YOX is RSGB RLO, and the only CDXC member in GU.

In 1997 the leading European operators were GI0KOW and G4BUO, with scores of 6.1m and 4.4m respectively. Band conditions ought to be better in 1998, but I had no illusions about being able to take on Andrew GI0NWG, at GI0KOW, a fine station with several towers and monobanders. However, I hoped to beat Dave G4BUO. Dave and I have long been friendly rivals, and he is a fine operator with an excellent station. But I was counting on the "GU factor", the fact that I would be spotted on PacketClusters, would be actively sought and moved by multi-ops, and so on. Assuming that Dave would improve on his 1997 score, I needed to be aiming for 5m points or thereabouts. This looked like needing perhaps 4000 QSOs and a multiplier of well over 500 (from GJ in 1990 I made 3062 QSOs and 459 mults for 3.3m points).

When the contest started I checked 20m, but there wasn't much doing, so I decided to focus my early activity on 40m. This proved to be a good move, and I see that I stayed there until 0330, by which time I had 396 QSOs, 37 countries and 11 zones in the log. This first session also gave me what would prove to be my best hourly rate of the contest – 174 in the 0200 to 0300 slot, narrowly beating the 172 I achieved on 15m the second evening.

My rough plan (I tend to play things very much by ear once the contest has started) was to go for numbers on the first day, and then spend a bit more time the second day looking for missing multipliers. The downside to this is that multiplier hunting requires more concentration than running, which can be difficult towards the end of a contest when you are suffering severe tiredness.

Anyway, this is my excuse for making relatively few band changes on Day 1. After 40 it was a session on 160, in the hope of catching some decent multipliers in the Caribbean. This was not to be, and I had to make do with a fast run of Europeans, plus CT3, 5B4 (good old George 5B4AGC, ex-G3LNS) and a handful of W/VE.

Just after 0500 I moved up to 80, which was considerably more productive, with plenty of North Americans and a rates of 120+ (I actually had 21 hours of 100+ across the contest as a whole). One of the nice things about operating from a rare spot is the multipliers which call you – from that 80m session I notice D44 and EA9 as examples.

After 80 it was back onto 40 for a while, with a good run into the West Coast, plus some nice extras such as KH6 and a few JAs (not long-path as this morning opening is commonly described - they were coming in from the "normal" short-path heading).

Once 40 started to slow I moved straight up to 10m which was already open. I have been caught out before with solar storms or auroras which knock out 10m half-way through a CQWW contest, so I like to hit the band the first day if it is open, to be on the safe side. I quickly worked some nice ones, like 3W and HS0 (another CDXC member – HS0/G3NOM), and was surprised that when I was calling mults I usually got through in the first one or two calls. Obviously the Club’s TH6 was working well, even though I had discovered before the contest (but too late to do anything about it) that we had inadvertently interchanged two of the elements, which meant that 10m was beaming the opposite way to 15 and 20!

After the best part of two hours on 10, it was obvious that I was working mostly Europeans, and ought to be looking for Asian mults on 15 and 20. In retrospect I should have done this sooner. 15 quickly came up with the goods, with ZL, VK, etc. Again, the GU call helped – I notice a quick 3-bander (15, 10 and 20) with 3V8BB and then back to running on 15 less than two minutes later. Soon after 1100 I was on 20m and running the US again, 15 and 10 not having opened with me to North America at that stage. It was nice to be called during that session by UK single-op rivals GI0KOW, GD4UOL and G4BUO. Better that they should spend time chasing me than vice versa!

I moved back to 10m for a further couple of hours, but the band started to slow down with me 1500, and I see that I then moved down to 15, with occasional forays onto the low bands in the hope of finding some good mults around dusk. However, my log shows very few – I had more success the second night, probably because the pile-ups were smaller (V8A is a good example – I couldn’t make any impression on his pile-up on 40 the first night, but the second evening it was an easy mult.).

I see that, between 1500 and 1900, most of my activity was on 15, with a steady run into North America. I then fell asleep for about 90 minutes. Whether this was a good time to break I really cannot say – it was more a matter of succombing to the inevitable!

Anyway, by the time I re-entered the contest, 10 and 15 were closed and I ran 20 until about 2300 when I deemed it time to start moving around the low bands again. Looking at the 20m log for that operating session, there were very few mults, though KL7, XE and TI were all nice double mults and all called me (the TI also taking me to 40 for a further, easy double mult).

By the end of Day 1 I had 2427 QSOs in the log, plus 337 mults. I had hoped to make closer to 3000 QSOs the first day, but really had no cause for complaint.

I was quite pleased with the way the 80m dipole was working, with a steady stream of callers from Europe and North America (a 130 hour between 0100 and 0200, for example) but disappointed that relatively few multipliers called in. With so many multi-multi and multi-single efforts around, I would have thought that more of them would have been on the ball and found me as I moved from band to band. The 6Y2A did a great job in that respect, but I found the serious single-op competitors, especially CT1BOH and W2GD, both operating from P40, to be much more aggressive in finding me and moving me between bands than were many of the multi-ops.

Back on 40 I had another good run then, between about 0500 and 0600 finally got a reasonable run into the US and Canada on 160m. As a topband enthusiast, I knew that GU was much sought after on topband, and had received lots of e-mails before my trip asking for 160m skeds. In the end I managed 66 W and 5 VE QSOs on 160, so hopefully there will be at least a few satisfied customers.

At dawn I had a multiplier-hunting session around all the bands before going back to running on 80 and, when it closed, 40. The 40m opening was great fun, with a steady stream of zone 3 and 4 stations, some nice mults like ZM2K, and then the most incredible pile-up of JAs. I could happily have run this for hours, but it didn’t take long to realise that the sheer size of the pile-up had slowed my rate considerably and that I would be better moving back up to the higher bands. I must have left many disappointed JAs, but I’m sure I was right in the context of making a high score.

I see that my rates during the 0900 to 1300 period on the Sunday were the lowest of the contest. I never got a JA pile-up running on the high bands (which, I believe, was also the experience of most of other operators in this part of Europe) and had to wait until the bands opened to the US to see rates start to climb once more. In fact, I was beginning to despair of achieving the sort of score I had promised myself, with 3192 QSOs and 401 mults by midday.

In the event, I need not have worried. 10m opened much better than on the Saturday, right across to the West Coast, and stayed open until much later in the day. I ran on there until 1730, by which time I had exceeded 1000 QSOs on the band.

It was time to move back to 15m, which I had rather been neglecting, and I had my second highest rate of the contest, with 15m also nicely open to all parts of the US. By the time the band had dropped out, 20 was also pretty much dead with me, so it was a case of chasing around the low bands for missing mults. There were some nice ones to be had – A61AJ on 40, and an immediate QSY to 80, for example and, perhaps my most satisfying mult of the contest, XZ1N worked through a big pile-up on 80, with them then thanking me for the GU mult!

Sadly, I drifted off to sleep for the last hour, waking up quite literally as the contest ended, so I will have missed a few more mults. Old age is obviously having its effect! A post-contest low-bands sked with ZS6EZ failed, so it was back to the guest house for a good night’s rest, before spending Monday dismantling and catching the ferry home.

In these days of computer logging, preparing the contest entry is trivially easy, though it was almost Christmas before I finally got myself organised and completed the task. By that time I had received something like 150 direct QSLs, so was able to check my logging accuracy. Interestingly, to date I have found no errors in my logging, but have received several QSLs for contacts which are certainly not in my log – nothing even remotely resembling the calls concerned. It is interesting to speculate why this should be. Did these folk genuinely think, in the heat of the pile-up, that they had worked me, or are they trying it on?

I must record my grateful thanks to members of the Guernsey Amateur Radio Society, all of whom were incredibly helpful and hospitable, and without whose help the operation would have been impossible. As well as help in setting up, several dropped in over the weekend to make cups of coffee, or just to provide moral support, and there were three there on the Monday to help me break the station down. I particularly want to thank Phil, GU0SUP, who was my main contact throughout, and whose support was unstinting.

Tots 4258 9675 2.27 127 430 => 5,388,975

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