Episode 16: Recapping CQWW CW 2017
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The contest ended on Sunday afternoon. I am ready to share my thoughts about CQ Worldwide CW for 2017. It’s a short episode recapping the biggest contest of the year.
The radio room is still a little unkempt after a solid weekend of amateur radio contesting over the November 25 and 26 weekend. If participation went according to recent trends, we had more than 8,000 contestants from around the world in the CQ Worldwide DX CW contest – it was a Morse code feeding frenzy for many of us, and I enjoyed every single second on the air.
Here in the radio room I still have a few coax jumper cables laying about, and my ears are still decoding Morse code in anything resembling a pattern of noise. It’s all over but for the ringing in my ears and some should’ve-would’ve thoughts.
First things first. How did I do, compared to my goals? The short version is I did a lot better than I ever thought I would.
I went in with a simple and — at the time last week when I divulged my predictions — lofty goal of 1,500 Qs, 150 multipliers – that’s the total number of CQ Zones and DXCC countries worked on each band — for a 500,000-point score.
I managed to finish with 1,989 contacts, 228 multipliers and 970,000 points. So I’m happy. I don’t think many people expected the bands to be as strong as they turned out to be. I sure didn’t.
It was so much fun I ended up putting in my longest-ever CQWW CW session — 37 hours is one more hour than I managed in 2012, which was my previous iron-pants record for this contest.
Thanks to some short-ish naps at just the right times — but not sleeping a lot longer than planned — I don’t feel too beat up at the finish line. Sure needed a LOT of coffee through the weekend.
Working the world
I think the best surprise was a ZS station from South Africa calling me on 15M during a US run Sunday mid-morning. the band shouldn’t have supported that path but the signal was loud and probably on a skew.
Going into the contest I was curious to see how the HQ9X lads would make out from Roatan, a Caribbean island off the Honduras mainland. They were booming in here every time I worked them (80M through 15M). If I ever get to retire, that’s the place for me. Verticals on the beach, and nothing but blue water to the horizon. Dream on, I guess. The XYL says I can go any time I want. And take the dog with me.
By the end I had netted 75 countries, so not even DXCC from here, but it was fun hunting for countries anyway. It would have been better if Saturday had not been so rough. I really missed Europe on 15M – all I was able to get on 15M across the Atlantic was a single Zone 33 in north Africa. Oh, and that lovely South African surprise.
I loved some of the runs on 15M and 20M. On Sunday afternoon I worked 418 stations in one session — peaking with a 60-minute rate of 185 per hour — before moving to 40M for the final hour or so.
The AL-80B amplifier here ran like a champ, but the sturdy old SB-221 was great until I needed to go to the AL-80B for 160M. Then I just left the 40-year-old Heathkit resting for the remainder of the contest.
Sidetracks
About two of my 11 off-hours were spent on gear. When I wanted to run the second radio (on 40M) while running on 80M, I couldn’t get it configured for about an hour. CAT wasn’t working properly, until I realized the radio was in memory mode not VFO mode. Duh. Fixed, and had a great time with dueling CQs on 40 and 80 for about three hours from midnight to 3 a.m. when it was slow enough to stay on top of things.
I would have made a lot more Qs on a single radio without the down-time getting the SO2R figured out, but it was a good investment in time as I haven’t really done much two-radio in CW tests. The radios and antennas worked just fine with minimal interaction even with high power, at least on 40M and 80M. Will do more of that in future. Maybe in RAC Winter at the end of December.
I also spent the better part of an hour on Saturday afternoon getting the MFJ-1026 noise cancelling box working and hooked up (haven’t used it since the July 2016 shack rebuild, but 20M was so noisy to the east all weekend I needed to defeat the power line hash). Worked like a charm with the 40M quad as the reference sensing antenna.
I must have been an earless gator on Saturday pointing southeast. I could tell there were lots of low-power stations in the noise but couldn’t work ’em until the box was set up, and then my rate shot up.
Okay. That’s one more behind us on the slow crawl across the bottom of the cycle. Pretty good fun considering where we are, and where I am in VE7-land with modest antennas.
On to Top Band and 10M RTTY next
I sure appreciate everyone who called in. This weekend we move on to the ARRL 160M contest, and I’ll be running the AL-80B as a high-power entry for the first time ever. I am really looking forward to seeing how much difference a few dB in signal strength can make.
In this contest, the world is trying to work American and Canadian stations, and for me that’s a perfect situation. I don’t expect to work very much DX off the continent, but I should be able to play well across North America and hopefully into the Caribbean. Even on that short hop I have lots of unworked countries to add to my DXCC total on 160M.
The top band antenna – an Inverted-L with three elevated radials, all connected to a folded-counterpoise isolator or FCP box – hasn’t been touched since last year, so all things are equal except the power output this year.
If you’re into banging your head against a wall, and I know many of you are, there is also the 10M RTTY contest this weekend (Dec. 3, 2017). The band won’t be open much, if at all, but you could find some spotlight propagation and rest assured there will be stations out there listening or calling CQ no matter how dead the band might seem. This is a fun teletype contest that offers some daylight distraction in the hours when 160M isn’t workable.
Thanks for listening. Let’s go get ‘em. I’ll see you out there.