W4KAZ

The propagation conditions were better to EU than its been for quite a long while.  That made the contest a lot more enjoyable than the DX contests have been over the past few years from here in the “cheap seats”[low power into low dipoles].  I’m sure the scores at the big stations will reflect the changes.

For my own part it went quite well-even with a small station

In the week before the contest, conditions were sounding good, with good openings on 15m and 20m.  There was no real plan to put in a heavy effort here, but instead to have fun and get in some CW practice.  Check.  Mission accomplished.

Overall, with conditions so much better it was easy to stay in the chair longer than planned. 15m opened early on both days, just after local sunrise.  20m was hot in the early afternoon, and 40m and 80m both opened to Europe earlier than I usually notice.  There were even a few QSO’s on the edges from 160m and 10m.  The 160m Q’s were early in the evening, when I was hearing a few EU stations, but they weren’t hearing the dulcet tones emanating from the Kazshack.  The 10m QSO’s were very fluttery, with lots of QSB, but worth chasing anyway.

The operating plan quickly morphed from “Search and Pounce” into finding a place to try to run.  The original idea was to operate “unlimited” and play “S&P2R”.  The network connection never got connected after tuning around a bit and shifting the gray matter into run mode.  Wedging into a good spot is always a problem, but once found the good conditions had the stations lining up.  Sometimes too many – a new experience from the KazShack.  But good spots were hard to find and a lot of time running was done at lower rates up in the “nosebleed” areas higher in the band.

The runs brought in a lot of surprises.  On 40m finding and working the KH6 was a surprise, as well as being called by a TA and a ZC up on 15m .  Early on the second day I also found a JA1 on 40m, but no joy – working left coast.  Some of the surprises were unusual enough to cause the brain to balk on copying the call sign correctly – V51 in particular.  A search and pounce sweep on 10m and 15m bagged ZM1A on 15m,  as well as five of the 10m mults.

15m showed signs of signals from Europe just after local sunrise, and they were able to hear me soon thereafter.  Probably an hour or so earlier than that for the stations with good 15m antennas.  But the lack of good antennas served to limit the volume of responses rather than shut the band to use.  I was able to run stations on 15m after 1230z on the second day.  Just a couple of hours later, and 20m became hospitable for a low power run above 14100.

Being a fan of 15m, not much time was spent in the local evening hours.  Its difficult for the DX to hear the 100w stations through their local QRM and QRN.  With 15m and 20m open, that’s not the disaster it has been in the past couple of years.

It will be interesting to see the scores and compare them to those of the past couple of years.

The Good:

• Conditions!
• More like fun, less like work
• Decent runs

The Bad:

• Problems with copy on unexpected calls
• Pile up skills

The Ugly:

• Possible problem with K2 KAT100 auto-tuner on Ant1, used ant2 for duration of the contest

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Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
  160:    5     5
   80:   55    28
   40:  191    46
   20:  187    45
   15:  131    45
   10:    8     6
-------------------
Total:  577   175  Total Score = 302,925

amended 2010/2/26

Nothing great, but not too shabby. 352 Qsos total.

Conditions and observations: Early in the contest conditions seemed poor to me, but perhaps I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. At the start, I tried to get a run going on 20m and use the second radio for S&P, but neither was working well. The run radio was slow on the 20m dipole. I guess all of those tri-banders out there have the advantage. 20m seemed long from the start, as I was called by a strong AL9A. Alaska is unusual so early in the afternoon on my dipole.

The S&P on 15m was none too productive either. There were a few stations there, but lots of QSB. Most seemed to give up calling on 15m pretty quickly[or vanished due to changes in propagation]. Nothing heard on 10m, but not a lot of time listening there either.

It is also obvious that I’ll need to become a much better operator before using the second radio during a run is practical. Even a slow run. But the NAQP’s are the perfect contests to use as a test platform for learning SO2R techniques.

On the other hand, S&P with two radios was a lot more productive than S&P with a single radio. Better than using a single radio and loading the band map. With two radios, the utility of the second band map also comes into effect. The rate went up as soon as I switched from running to all S&P. I didn’t hit my goal of 60/hr while S&Ping, but it is a goal within reason, and it was easy to keepa 40 to 50 rate with two radios without much stress.

Thats the first couple of hours. The late afternoon was broken up into S&P fragments, capped with a hour long 40m run from 2220z to2320z. Then another gap peppered with a handful of quick S&P Q’s and a break for a sandwich.

Shifting down to 80m, I S&P’d my way to a mostly clear frequency at 3563.75, and thenheld a two hour run there from 0100z to 0300z. While the rates were meager for somebody like Bigg Gunn Kontester over at the Fi-Ni Report, both those hours on 80m were over 60/hr. I gave it up soon after W4HSA called me, and I just could not get his call correct, even when he resorted to sending his call suffix at about 5wpm. Such is life in LidVille. Duh-OH!

Still short of 300 Q’s. Tuning around 40m was discouraging, as the band sounded really long and there were not a lot of stations calling. 80m seemed like mostly dupes, so on a whim it seemed time to check conditions down on 160m.

The 160m antenna was playing well again. There were only three stations that were called with no answer. Soon enough stations were S&P’d to get to 340 Q’s in the log.

A few more passes on 80m and 160m, and the plug was pulled at around 0400z withjust over 350 logged. The total time on the clock was about 9 hours, but a lot of that was spent away from the radio in increments more than 5 minutes, but less than 30.

The Good:

• Just over two consecutive hours with rates over 60/hr. First time I’ve had two such hours back-to-back.
• 160m antenna continues to function well

The Bad:

• A moment of Murphy when switching to 80m. The kludged-together band pass filter switching resulted in a few moments of angst filled debugging when it appeared the 80m antenna was showing a high SWR. [Operator Error.]
• No productivity early in the contest.
• 20m slow.

The Ugly:

• Total mental shutdown trying to copy W4HSA. Too bad it can’t be blamed on being exhausted or a weak signal. Nope. Just a lid moment here in the KazShack.

Summary:

Band QSOs Mults
-------------------
 160:  40  19
  80: 167  36
  40:  89  31
  20:  45  19
  15:  11   3
  10:     
-------------------
Total: 352  108 Total Score = 38,016

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