Last year I took part in the IARU HF World Championship contest and to my surprise I won it for England as SOAB/LP SSB and I received the certificate for it on Friday before the contest.
So I was rather keen to keep my spot again for this year, although I knew I was never going to make hundreds of qsos from the home qth, last year I only made 100 according to my log so surely it wasn’t going to be so hard to keep the spot again this year.
For antennas I decided I was just going to use the hustler 6-btv vertical along with the windom 80m cw special, although a yagi and 40ft would have been much better and wires for 160m – 40m but just have to make use of special available to use.
Also last year I used N1MMLogger to do all the logging as at that time I was just trying any bit of software I could get my hands on to see if I liked it, this year I decided to use Win-Test and it performed great! Didn’t crash once and I didn’t notice any problems during the time I was using it and the rig control with the Kenwood ts-570dge worked just fine.
The start of the contest went quite well there was inter-G conditions on 20m so working GB5HQ was really easy but I’m sure it made working other stations much harder. 15m seemed pretty open most of the afternoon and night too.
Sadly I wasn’t able to work any of the WRTC guys and I only worked 1 USA station to my surprise guess its just because of the part of the solar cycle we our in.
80/40m in the evening was pretty hard going hence the low totals for those bands although for the first time ever I’ve made more then 1 qso on 80m which kind of pleases me to a point, as most of the time 80m seems like a waste of time from the current QTH in the centre of oxford.
At the end of the contest ended up with 162 qsos for about 6hrs operating time which I don’t thinks too badly for S&P see the breakdown below for more information.
Callsign : M3PHP
Mode : PHONE
Category : Single Operator (SO)
Band(s) : All bands (AB)
Class : Low Power (LP)
Zone/State/… : 27
Operating time : 6h10
BAND QSO DUP ITU HQ POINTS AVG
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160 0 0 0 0 0 0.00
80 6 0 2 3 8 1.33
40 12 1 2 10 14 1.17
20 92 0 8 20 230 2.50
15 52 0 6 16 126 2.42
10 0 0 0 0 0 0.00
————————————–
TOTAL 162 1 18 49 378 2.33
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TOTAL SCORE : 25 326
