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We’re into contest season, with some major events coming up in late October and November. What can we learn from recent conditions to help earn better scores?

That’s our subject for Episode 14 of Zone Zero. Let’s get started.

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Thanks for joining in for Episode 14. Time sure does fly. When we started Zone Zero, spring hadn’t even arrived properly, and now here we are staring winter in the face. Boomer, the VA7ST Border Collie is still out there going crazy for his Frisbee but it won’t be long before Boomer is stepping through snow instead of green grass.

Over the summer I added a new radio to the shack – one that provides 2M all-mode capability – and a new amplifier, which adds high-power on 160M, which I’ve never had before. I did some antenna work, spray-painting the Steppir 3-element yagi with hunter green Krylon paint, and putting up an 8-element cross-polarized yagi for 2M.

I got hooked on meteor scatter modes on 6M, and I spent a lot of time poking around inside an old but wonderful amplifier looking for trouble I never did quite track down. But now the tools are put away, the lawns are being prepped for winter, and we put behind us those bright warm days that seemed to stretch out ahead of us forever just a few months ago.

Weekend contesting is back on the front burner here, and even with depressed radio conditions I’m still having a lot of fun making contacts in as many events as I can manage.

Over the past weekend, October 14 and 15, we had the international teletype contest known as the Makrothen – it’s a favorite of mine, because you get one point for every kilometer between you and the other stations you contact.

Scores go up quickly, especially if you can work DX stations.

But if you can only work domestic stations in your own continent – for me, that would be North America – the Makrothen can be a long slog, with low points per contact. I mention this because this time out, that’s precisely what we saw with conditions from the West Coast.

I could hear stations from the East Coast working European stations at will on Sunday morning, when I could barely hear the Midwest well enough to work them. That’s really frustrating – I knew my paltry score of 500,000 points wouldn’t be even close to competitive this year.

I’ve finished in the Top 20 worldwide in previous years, so the station itself isn’t the problem. It’s the HF bands themselves. They favor anyone who doesn’t rely on a path over the North Pole to reach Europe, and that’s going to dictate performance in the major contests coming up over the next few weeks.

The CQ Worldwide Phone contest is Oct. 27 and 28, and then a month after that is the CQ Worldwide CW contest on Nov. 25 and 26.

If you’re in the West, being competitive will require two things: wringing everything you can out of 15 meters if it opens at all, and working Asia across the Pacific to help make up for what you will miss looking a Europe.

It would be so rose-colored-glasses of me to say access to Japan and the rest of Asia without a polar path makes up in any way for being able to work Europe cleanly, but it doesn’t even come close. The fact is, Europeans won’t likely hit California and vice versa unless there’s a little flurry of sunspot activity in the days before the big contests.

I mentioned 15M because at this point in the solar cycle that band is just about dead most of the time. But through late September and the first half of October this year, there has been some life on 21 Mhz. Not a lot of life, but I expect that in the CQ Worldwide contests – Phone later in October and CW in late November – we will at least have openings across North America.

This will be important to watch for, because 20M is going to be the money band where you’ll work the most stations, but you’ll want to work as many of those stations again on 15M while that band is open.

Getting your QSO count as high as possible is a good strategy in years when the number of multipliers will be depressed due to missing bands like 10M.

If multipliers are scarce, at least go for the highest rate you can find.

Experienced contesters will know this intuitively, but if you’re just starting out or haven’t been through a solar cycle minimum before, this information could be useful as we head into the big worldwide contests.

As always, geography is a major factor in contest performance. If the polar path is closed, it’s closed and nothing can make up for that. All you can do is maximize local or domestic contacts in places you can reach. For me, that will be the US, Caribbean and South American countries.

Years ago, I would have also added Japan to that list, but the number of active contesters in Japan has plummeted over the past decade. These wonderful operators have diminished to the point where the once-powerful Japan advantage for North American West Coast operators like me just isn’t there. We can never compete with the East Coast and Midwest access to Europe.

Tough beans, I guess.

The polar path doesn’t handcuff everyone, of course. On the West Coast, the further south you go, the less of an impediment it becomes – to Europe and to Asia. This weekend, I read the following report from Mark, K6UFO operating at NN7SS in Washington State not far south of me.

Mark noted he had some remote station trouble in the Makrothen, but “When it was working, there were some good QSOs, lots of JAs, South Americans and plenty of USA.”

I can concur with the US and South American propagation, but Mark’s remote station is located on Vashon Island near Seattle. That’s a couple of hundred miles south of me, and way out on the Pacific coast – obviously a great salt-water shot to Japan. I don’t have that, and Japan was all but invisible to me during the past weekend’s conditions.

For a bit more about what we can expect in CQ Worldwide contests, listen to Episode 13 – Chasing the action. We looked at the solar conditions during the September running of the CQ Worldwide RTTY contest as a predictor of conditions in late October and again in late November.

That’s it for Zone Zero. Thanks for listening. Let’s go get ‘em in the contests. I’ll see you out there.