G3TXF in CQWW-SSB Contest - Oct 2012

A single 4-el yagi at 80ft was used for a 10m SOSB - Assisted entry in CQWW SSB.

Worked 152 Countries and 39 Zones. Missed Zone: 37. G3TXF was QRV for about 27½ hours over the two days. Saturday operated from 06z through to 20z (14 hours) and on Sunday from 0730z through to just before 21z (13½ hours).

There was an extra hour or so of operating on the Sunday evening not because of improved DX conditions on 10m but because there was some useful Sporadic-E propagation around Europe. This provided a last minute flurry of inter-EU QSOs during the last hour of operating. No idea if there was any similar E opening on the Saturday, as I had finished calling the DX on the band at 20z.
G3TXF takes a quick tea break while operating 10m in CQWW SSB. One of the great unsung advantages of CW (as opposed to SSB) is that on CW the contest operator can eat and drink while continuing to operate seamlessly. This is just not possible on SSB with a boom-mic in the way!

Station: IC-7800, Acom 2000 amp and Win-Test.
The hourly rate graph (left) illustrates clearly how the contest was operated.

During the Saturday morning only Multipliers were worked. Up until the first USA stations could be worked from about 13z on the Saturday, only Multipliers were worked which resulted in low hourly QSO rates.

The average rate up to 13z was only about 20 QSOs per hour. The first 120 or so QSOs were all Mults. Once the USA started coming in at about 13z, the next three hours was spent just working the USA, and only a small amount of time was spent in working Multipliers.

However on Sunday there was a more even split between running QSOs on one frequency and breaking off to call the Multipliers.

Usually Mults to the West/South are snapped up pretty quickly but they can take longer to the East/South-East.

4-el 10m yagi at 80ft erected for the CQWW SSB Contest on the day before the contest, then taken down soon thereafter.
Operating highlights included:

* working six BY stations in a row on the Sunday morning, each calling me one after the other.

* being called by WL7E for the Zone 01 Multiplier.

* working DXCC in under six hours.

* being called by E51CG late on Sunday afternoon

* working KH7X on the Long Path (South Pole) for a double Mult on the Sunday morning.

* having a claimed score (just over 1 million points) comfortably ahead of the current 10m SOSB-A record for England achieved by Darren G0TSM in 2011.

* 76 of the Country Mults were one-offs: i.e only one QSO was made with that Country.

Lowlights : even with the DX Cluster running in the background (through Win-Test) all the time, several useful Country multipliers were still missed. These included 7T50I, 8R1AK, VP8LP and ZD7VC.

DX
Top 10
- EU
Top 10
W
1,211
- DL
94
VE
114
- UR
62
JA
36
- UA
61
UA9
29
- I
54
PY
22
- SP
35
LU
20
- YO
30
BY
14
- OK
20
CE
9
- OH
17
VK
8
- LZ
15
ZS
6
- 9A
13
The top ten numbers of DX countries and European Countries worked in the CQWW SSB Contest on 10m.
Continental breakdown : 63% of the 2,132 QSOs were with North America, 26% with Europe and just 6% with Asia.

These recent scores are still all a long way behind the CQWW SSB 10m Single-Op unassisted record of nearly 1.5m points held by Al G3FXB from October 1988.

Typical mix of North Devon weather for a contest weekend: Bright sunshine and blue skies on the Saturday followed by heavy rain and high winds on the Sunday.
Back to G3TXF Mainpage