P40L-P49Y Contest Summary Information

Doing this contest in the Classic category was a lot of fun. But there were challenges.

I had a poor start. I made the mistake of starting on 20 meters. The band was in excellent shape but there just weren’t enough stations to sustain the desired rate. After 10 minutes or so, I moved to 40. Again, the band was in good condition and the rate was excellent for about 15 minutes, but after that, there were not enough stations calling. Turns out, the place to be at the beginning of the contest was 15, which was in great shape and very productive until I moved to 20 at around 0130z (which by then had plenty of activity).

My poor initial band choices were compounded by high line noise (most likely as a result of accumulated salt on the power lines due to prolonged dry local conditions). On 20, it was 20db over 9 when beaming EU and S-8 when beaming NAm. On 15 and 10, it was more like S-8 when beaming EU and S-6 when beaming NAm. The beverages helped on the low bands, but the NE beverage also had an unusual strong pulsing noise that was a killer. Also, as noted by others, conditions on 80 and 160 were very poor from the Caribbean. These high noise levels continued all of Friday night and Saturday. Then, mysteriously, mostly disappeared by Sunday morning. By then, however, I only had 5.3 hours of operating time remaining.

I experienced a fair amount of deliberate jamming during the first couple of hours of the contest, further reducing some of the fun. Thankfully, I experienced little deliberate interference during the rest of the contest.

Fortunately, conditions on the high bands during the daylight hours were excellent, with many signals readily copiable despite the high noise level. It would have been a lot easier, however, without the noise and listening through the noise was definitely more fatiguing (and, “no,” I could not find any setting of the K3 noise blanker that helped much).

One difficult judgment call in the Classic category is how to budget time between running and mult hunting. Each mult is only worth approximately 3 minutes of operating time, so any S&Ping has to be efficient and targeted. You cannot afford to spend time listening to a weak station that identifies itself infrequently. Instead, the strategy has to be to focus on quickly finding relatively easy mults that might never call you when running. If you inadvertently run across some rare ones that may be great, but not if you have to spend several minutes breaking through their pile up.

I ended up spending around an hour and 35 minutes looking for mults, not counting time spent looking for new run frequencies (which often yielded a new mult or two). Mult hunting generally fell into a couple of categories: (1) inadvertant S&P while looking for a run frequency on a new band; (2) quick scans on the low bands looking for loud stations to work, especially the SAm and Caribbean mults; and (3) targeted scans on the high bands (e.g., hunting for mults from SAm or Oceania late afternoon on 10 and 15 by pointing a beam in those directions).

One of the attractions of the Classic category is that it only requires 24 hours of operating time. So, that means plenty of sleep time, right? Maybe not to the extent you might initially suppose. If you want to maximize your results, it is hard not to feel compelled to get back on the air every hour or so throughout the night for 5 to 10 minutes to scan the bands for mults, especially the low bands. That is how almost all my contacts on 160 and 80 were made. That meant that at least Friday night and most of Saturday night, I only had a couple of one-hour naps.

Going into Sunday morning, I was concerned I had spent too much time mult hunting and decided to focus on running rate. This turned out to be good call. The line noise that had plagued me on Friday and Saturday was mostly gone and conditions on 10 and 15 were excellent. I finished the last 5.3 hours of operating time at 2246z making 1362 QSOs at an average hourly rate of 257 (and about 20 new mults that called in).

I had tentatively hoped to muster a low power multi-single effort for this contest, with an eye to improving on the existing world record during the favorable portion of the sunspot cycle. However, I wasn’t able to get organized early enough to make that happen. I don’t really enjoy 48 hour contests as a single op, especially phone, so the Classic category was the alternative. It is a fun category and entails a different set of strategic considerations than any other. With a little luck, though, we’ll be back with a MS LP effort before the sunspots disappear!

As always, thanks to everyone who participated and gave us a QSO. It is much appreciated.

73, John, W6LD/P40L QSL via WA3FRP

  
Station (all towers on a 100x100’ lot):

Rohn 45 tower (66’): Single boom 2-element shortened 40m interlaced with
4-element 20m (68’) (JK2040, long-boom version); 80m Inverted-V (65’); 160m
Double-L center-fed vertical dipole (65’)

North Rohn 25 tower (56’): Single boom 5-element 15 interlaced with 6-element
10 (58’) (JK1015 configured for dual feed)

South Rohn 25 tower (45.5’): Tri-bander (JK Mid-tri)

Receiving antennas: 4 Beverages controlled by K9AY 2x8 switchbox: JA/West-US
(800’), East US (500’), EU (800’) and East-West (AF and OC) (350’)

Rig:   K3/P3

Amplifier:   KPA1500