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....