Call/Station/Op: W1XX
Class: SOAB HP
Op Time (hrs): 9
Summary
Band QSOs Grids
6 397 126
2 29 13
_____________________________________
Total: 426 139 Total Score = 63,245
Club: CTRI Contest Group
Comments:
Surprise…surprise. Classic CW/SSB is alive and well on 6 meters. Didn’t expect to do much in the CQ WW VHF Contest this weekend, but was pleasantly surprised. Had a few station issues in the first hour, but once we cleared out the cobwebs, it was GO. Had to open up a run frequency above 50.200 it was so busy. Worked a handful of DM grids which was nice. Time was limited on Sunday by prior family stuff, but got back on in the last hour which was gangbusters. Several rovers with outstanding signals called in on 6 meters. 2 meters suffered from the max activity on 6. Only CTRI’er I heard was K1SX who beat me out calling somebody. Lotsa fun!
Agreed! Great prop & something of a cw revival. I’ll post more tmw , tstorms are so intense here I unplugged the PC. I have to win a jump ball sooner or later hi!
K1SX
SOSB 6M LP (although there is no LP category!)
102-69–7038
About 6 hrs op time
25 watts to LFA3 @ 20 ft. 25w is way better than 5w. I avoided SSB because I suspected the half-finished amp turned my audio quality and IMD from bad to worse, and in fact the last SSB q i made, I got a good insult on it.
Well that was a super good one for me, the first time I exceeded 100 q’s in a VHF contest. I usually think 20 in this one is a decent number, but it just opened at the start and stayed open almost all day both days. The tally–
CW 38
SSB 6
FT8 25
FT4 33
Nothing from Eu, and XE2X (on cw) the only dx in the log. I just didn’t want to sit on FT8 and call the caribbean dx when they were slogging thru big pileups, even tho I was getting spotted there. With just my low 3 el, there was plenty of US activity from FL all the way around to upper midwest and a little multihop to NM and AZ too.
Good news–Lots of CW activity. You were not forced to use FT8 to play in this contest. John’s score shows that. But there was also FT4 for the first time. FT4 was a lot more productive than FT8 especially for the time spent. This was partly because it was less crowded. There’s too much qrm on the 3khz FT8 segment. We will just have to learn to tune for digital. But I felt like FT4 put some of the rush back in. It’s almost as fast as RTTY and much more sensitive. Possibly things will mature to where FT8 is used for weak signals until the band is clearly open, then FT4 to increase the rate, and CW/SSB when the prop is strongest. OTOH I could have run up more numbers if I was willing and had the time to sit on FT8. You probably have to do that if you want to be among the very top scores.
That must be why some excellent CW operators sit on FT8 at one qso per minute (or worse) when they obviously have strong propagation and big pileups. Maybe they figure they are working a lot of non CW users. ( but then why not try SSB?) The latest software makes it work whether or not “VHF contest mode” is being used and that meant everyone on FT8 was in the contest whether they knew it or not.
W1XX, K3IU, W1HI heard but did not have a chance to connect. I have to remember John’s tactic of going up high, I never tuned past 50.200!