I’ve been meaning to write a little round up of CQ WPX SSB for a couple of weeks but it got a little side tracked so this its now time to play catch up a bit, this year I again joined The Vulture Squadron Contest Group using the callsign G9V (Rather good for this contest!). After issues with the TB-3 yagi in CQWW SSB this time we had a Spiderbeam that we picked up second hand to try and apart from a few minor issues it worked excellent and exceeded expectations.
Last year in M/S we made 2100q and again we planned to do the same this year but we didn’t get interlocking sorted so ended up operating as M/2 but that wasn’t too much of an issue and we all enjoyed the category so possibly see some further M/2 entries.
Ian (M0IRD) & Iain (M0PCB)
The main station was a K3 and Acom 1000 into a spiderbeam at around 35 feet and quarter-wave verticals for 40m and 80m. We decided to put on a 2nd station rather than 160m this time, which was an FT-950 and KPA-500 into a Butternut HF-9v & Win-Test for Logging.
The spiderbeam worked amazingly well with huge runs on 10/15m to the NA & JA (Long path) we probably should have put in a little more effort on 20m but with the higher bands in better shape we thought we’d make the most of it. 40m/80m proved hard work and we struggled to get any decent runs on these bands as we couldn’t complete with the serious QRO coming out of mainland Europe we plan on improving this with 2 el switchable phased verticals in time for CQWW SSB in October.
It was also rather interesting to hear the noise on 10m of an X class flare happening.
Uploaded a few photos to Flickr – https://www.flickr.com/
Final summary for us was:-
Contest : CQ World Wide WPX Contest Callsign : G9V Mode : PHONE Category : Multi Operator - Two Transmitter (M2) Overlay : Open Band(s) : All bands (AB) Class : High Power (HP) Zone/State/... : Operating time : 47h57
BAND QSO DUP PFX POINTS AVG ----------------------------------- 160 0 0 0 0 0.00 80 285 1 150 760 2.67 40 372 6 182 969 2.60 20 567 6 181 1094 1.93 15 987 5 263 2298 2.33 10 878 14 358 2052 2.34 ----------------------------------- TOTAL 3089 32 1134 7173 2.32 =================================== TOTAL SCORE : 8 134 182
Operators:- M0GEJ, M0IRD, M0SPF, M0PCB 2E0SQL, M1LXM and G0HVQ