Ham Radio – A contact sport

Both the SSB and CW CQ World-wide contests are now behind us and it’s time for a post-mortem analysis.

Loyal readers will recall that after my 2007 CQ WW CW effort, I posted a note about what worked and what I needed to improve in future CW contesting efforts.  A year ago, I spent 30 hours in the contest and managed 316 QSOs for 206k points. A humble beginning.

Over the course of the past year, about the only change I was able to make to the station was the addition of real  lowband antennas (replacing the terrible AlphaDelta DX-B Sloper with an inverted L for 160 meters and a wire vertical for 80 meters switched via an DX-Engineering remote antenna switch).

I also kept working on improving my CW copying ability using Rufz.  I haven’t been able to find time to use it every day, but I do try to squeeze in a 5 minute CW practice session while traveling on business. In this year’s contest, I also switched to the “assisted” class. Although this forces me to compete against guys with amplifiers and those using CW Skimmer.

Contest Goals

My goals for the CQ WW SSB contest in October were to determine what weaknesses needed to be immediately addressed prior to the contest season and to work some new DXCC (countries) entities on SSB for the various bands.  Out of this effort, I decided that I desperately needed to improve my lowband antenna situation.

Here’s my 2008 CQ WW SSB results:

As you can see, still pretty weak on 80m. After this, I repositioned the 160m inverted L and replaced a hastily installed 80m L with a simple wire vertical. This made a world of difference.

I have  a theory that there was a loading issue with the 80m inverted L. It simply would not find a decent SWR match anywhere on the 80m band – but disconnecting the grounding from the radial field made an improvement. I suspect that my tower/antennas look like a match and the 80m L couldn’t load due to interaction with the rest of the system.

Anyway, with a working 80m vertical, my goals for CQ WW CW were:

• try to get some new DXCC on the lowbands – especially 80 meters
• more than 500 QSOs (recall last year’s total was 316 QSOs)
• more hours in the chair
• have fun

CQ WW CW Results

I’ve posted my results to the 3830 reflector:

Operating Time (hrs): 25

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Zones  Countries
------------------------------
  160:   14     7        7
   80:   78    17       41
   40:  166    24       75
   20:  287    27      103
   15:   79    18       47
   10:
------------------------------
Total:  624    93      273  Total Score = 620,004

Club: 

Comments:

Doubled my Qs from last year's attempt. This was done by: replacing the sloper
for 80/160 with better (wire) antennas, entering assisted class (packet
spotting), and a few more hours in the chair. Propagation was not any better
though.  

My primary goal was to increase my DXCC band/mode counts and have some fun. I
was hoping for at least 500 Qs. 

I know I'm outgunned in the SOAB(A) category. No amp means I'm one of those in
the SOAB(A) class running low power. I'm also competing with those using SO2R
and/or Skimmer. My IC-746 is also outdone by better rigs in an environment like
CQ WW. The QTH (Iowa) is also a disadvantage. 

Oh well... list of excuses from a little-pistol I guess. 

Rig: Icom IC-746
Antennas:
10/15/20: SteppIR 4 element @ 82'
40: Cushcraft XM-240 @ 85'
80: Wire 1/4 wave sloped vertical
160: Sloping Inv L with peak at 50'

Definite improvement and exceeded most of my goals (except time in the chair).

What helped to improve my contest score

To recap… here’s what helped to improve my score year over year and CW over SSB:

• Antennas! Can’t say enough about having a decent antenna system. I still have a lot of work to do here. No rx antennas, no 4 squares or stacked yagis. But a little effort can pay off huge dividends.
• Assisted mode. Sure, it’s a bit of a let down to rely on packet spots, but it’s fun to be able to knock through a lot of QSOs and mults. Just need to be careful to confirm the calls… there were quite a few that were incorrect on the network.
• CW practice.
• A PC and station test prior to the contest.

Where I still need to improve

There are still many areas in which I could improve my score.

• Time in the chair. 30 hours last year. 25 hours this year. A business trip to Connecticut Monday-Wednesday followed by relatives on Thanksgiving and then on Friday: Disney on Ice. I barely made it home in time for the start and was wiped out a few hours into the test.  A better chair would have helped as well.
• Less Search and Pounce… try Running. Now that I know that my signal is getting through, I really need to try to run rather than S&P. This effort was 100% S&P.
• Further station improvements. To be competitive, I’ll need to invest in some station improvements – many of these will take years to put in place. But planning and prioritizing will help.

More to come…

. .