17-18 February 2024
I have been thinking about this contest for a
while, not quite able to decide if I should compete or not as I have always
been upset with the format of the ARRL contests. In the end I really wanted to
do a competition again so Friday before the contest I decided to give it a go
and quickly moved a few things in the shack to put it into "contest" mode,
basically I removed some equipment from the main shack desk so that the radio
I wanted to use was at the right height in front of me.
Well it was
fun! But it was also frustrating, my usual complaint with the ARRL contests
still stands, it is really frustrating, as a non North American station, that
you can only work North American (US and Canada) stations, when you hear all
these "rare DX" stations but you cannot work them it is not fun. The ARRL
should consider a slight change, make all the US/Canadian states/provinces
multipliers but still allow contacts between "non" stations, even if it is
just 1 point (as apposed to 3) per contact.
Unless that change is made
as suggested by many non US stations this will be my last ARRL contest.
I entered the single operator, non assisted, all band, QRP class. Since my
R928+ has an issue, zero output and I really wanted to use a radio with a
spectrum scope, I ended up using the IC-7300 turned down to 5W, antennas were
a 2 element wire yagi on 40m and a Hex beam on 20m, 15m and 10m.
All
the equipment worked well, other than the hexbeam that came loose again from
the pipe connecting it to the rotator, this is the only weak point in an
otherwise great antenna! This did not cause much trouble on Saturday as there
was no wind but on Sunday the wind was howling so the antenna was turning
around all the time. Eventually I went outside and threw a rope over one of
the legs so that I could prevent the swinging. This helped and my "QSB"
immediately went away! Before the next contest I will permanently sort out
this issue!
It was the first time I used the Icom IC-7300 for a
contest, it would not normally be my first choice but I did not expect
pile-ups, many strong adjacent signals and I knew there would be no split
operation. I also wanted to do a contest using a simple radio with no dual
receive capabilities. The radio worked quite well but I do have to admit that
I missed the dual RX capability especially when in "Search and Pounce" mode. I
could not, while waiting for a station to come back to my call, scout around
for the next station to work with the second receiver. I am sure this cost me
some points and slowed my S&P rates down.
I also noticed that even
though the radio has good filters they are NOT "brick wall" filters. It
happened a few times that I was listening to a weak station inside the filter
and a strong station would call outside the filter, suddenly you could hear
the station outside the filter! I have never experience this before with
another radio. Looking at an audio scope of the signal you could clearly see
the signal "busting" the filter and becoming audible even a few 100Hz outside
the filter. Lesson learned, will use a different radio for the next contest.
The IC-7300 is great value for money but it is NOT a contest class radio.
Saturday morning I started on 40m, since it does not open
early I had the luxury of only starting at 4am. Initially things were slow
with signals from the USA very low down but as we neared dawn things picked up
a bit. conditions were never good enough on 40m to call CQ with a QRP station
but I did manage to work 46 stations on 40m before the band closed.
After 40m closed at around 0800Z I moved to 20m but it was closed as
were the other bands so I could take a break.
By 1100Z (1pm local) 10m
opened and I managed to work 125 stations before 10m closed again at 1900Z.
This included a few short runs after calling CQ, conditions were good enough,
the first time since 2014, that I could call CQ with 5W and work a few
stations before a stronger station moved in on my frequency and simply drowned
out my weak signal. It was fun to have a pile-up again running QRP!
10m was so busy CW stations could be heard all the way up to 28.200MHz,
finding a gap, even 500Hz wide was not easy!
Most of the stations were
well behaved, unfortunately I had one station, a well know US station, reply
to my CQ call (so he did hear me), after I worked him he simply started
calling CQ on my frequency and pushed me out! When calling CQ I had quite a
few pile-ups, unfortunately not all of them well behaved, many times I would
reply with something like "EZ?" but instead of only the station with EZ in his
call getting back to me a whole bunch would call again. Sometimes this got so
bad I would just keep quiet till they stopped and I could work the station I
first called. Sadly this slowed down things for everyone.
During this
time 15m and 20 were also open to some extend and I managed to work 71
stations on 15m and 7 on 20m, 20m was never great on Saturday.
My
total for Saturday was 248 including runs between 1600Z and 1900Z after
calling CQ, my best hourly rate was 47 QSO's. The total looked good so at that
point I was thinking if I started calling CQ earlier on Sunday a total of 500
QSO might be doable.
My modest station setup,
Icom IC-7300 @5W, Vibroplex CW paddle and computer to log.
Very busy 10m,
very few signals above S3 but very difficult to find an open space.
Even late in the
evening 10m was still busy but signals were weaker.
Sunday morning started slow and I soon realized
conditions were not as good as Saturday. 40m did not really open at all so my
first contacts for the day were on 20m. Conditions were a lot worse with every
contact taking a lot of time. Between 0200Z and 0500 I only managed to make 45
contacts on 20m and 29 on 15m. Then the bands closed.
I listened every
30 minutes or so but my first contacts after the morning session were only
after 1300Z on 10m where I managed to initially work a few weak stations using
"search and pounce", sadly the stations from Europe and Asia were booming it
but I was not allowed to work them.
It was only after 1600Z that things
improved slightly and I had a few very short runs on 10 and 15m. Things were
slowly getting better and I was hoping that 20m would open late in the evening
but unfortunately as I started hearing the first weak (European) stations on
20m the bands suddenly closed and all I could hear was a constant noise across
the bands with a few weak signals, mostly from Europe, being the only ones I
could hear.
This is what 20m
suddenly looked like at 20:55 local (1855Z), only a few strong stations from
Europe could be heard, noise was suddenly S7 where it was S1 before.
So that was the end of the contest for me, a total of 415 contacts and 143 multipliers for a claimed score of just over 173000. I suppose not too bad for a QRP station from Africa, we will see when the results are published in 6-10 months time.
Below you can see my band summery.
Band Total
40m
61
20m 66
15m 99
10m
189
10m was by far the most productive band, I am sure if I could work
stations outside North America I could have worked more than 1000 stations
without a problem.
The next mayor contest is the CQ WPX CW contest in
May so I have time to sort out a few things. That is one of my favorite
contests so I want to make a major effort.