CQ Worldwide DX Contest, CW
Call: W8AV
Operator(s): W8AV K4LT AF8A K8AJS W8RZ
Station: W8AV
Class: M/M HP
QTH: Ohio
Operating Time (hrs): 48
Summary:
Band QSOs Zones Countries
------------------------------
160: 61 14 40
80: 305 27 93
40: 988 37 137
20: 1598 39 137
15: 1343 39 139
10: 806 33 139
------------------------------
Total: 5101 187 681 Total Score = 12,699,708
Club: Mad River Radio Club
Comments:
Well another CQWW is in the books and it was a good one this year. As many of
you may know we dedicated this year's operation to the memory of one of our
team John Millet, K8JM who became a silent key earlier this year. Although
there were only five of us, I know John would have been proud.
During some of the pre-contest discussions, Doug, K4LT brought up the idea of
maybe doing a multi-multi operation since this would probably be the best
conditions we would every experience again in our lifetimes. Although hope
springs eternal that the next couple cycles will be better (assuming I make it
that long), Although we had originally considered a multi-two operations since
we had only five committed ops, Doug's idea had a great deal of merit and we
made the call to shoot the moon as a M/M to break the station scoring record.
We knew from the outset that we had no chance of scoring with the big boys in
this category but the object was to have fun and make tons of QSO's.
Over the summer, I made plans with Mike, W3MC to come over and re-build the 15
and 10 meter antennas, re-orient the top 20 in the rotator so that it pointed
in the right direction, and change our the linear taper pot in the 40 meter
ring that had burned up due to lightning. This was all accomplished in two days
of work with Mike doing a superb job. He rebuilt the 10 and bottom 15 on the
tower while I rebuilt the top 15 on the ground. We also got the 20 pointed the
right way and brought the 40 meter ring motor down for repair. After replacing
the indicator pot we discovered that the worm gear drive in the motor housing
was completely shot. Emergency calls to Thief River Falls, MN revealed that it
was going to take about 4 weeks to get a new motor from TIC. I remembered that
W0CG had a ring at his Ohio house that had never been put up so after a couple
e-mail exchanges I made the drive to Suffield,and picked up his motor, and
installed it on the tower.
All was well, or so I thought. The week before the contest I snagged Z81X on
160 and was elated to have a new one on the band. However, my efforts quickly
turned joy into pain. The 160 QSO did in the indicator pot again. I finally
chased the problem to a faulty bypass capacitor in the rotator choke at the
base of the tower (since my tower is base insulated for use as a series fed
vertical on 160, I need to use rotator chokes at the tower base to prevent
shorting the tower out and to prevent burning up the two rotators on the
tower). We also had severe wind storms that vibrated the boom/mast bolts loose
on the top 20 causing it to start a squeeky slide down the mast (it's 8 feet
above the top of the tower). The wind also broke half of the driven element
off of its mounting leaving it hanging precariously from the boom.
Fortunately, Tim W3YQ was in the area for a week doing tower work for RIck
K8ZH. A quick call to him and he arranged to come here Tuesday, which
ironically was the day I noticed the broken 40. We put the 20 back in postion,
borught down the 40 motor AGAIN, and brought down the 40 beam for repair. I
made all of the necessary repairs on Wednesday and Tim planned to return
Thursday to put everything back up. Although it was rainy on Thursday, we
managed to get everything re-installed and working properly A huge thanks to
W3YQ for saving my bacon here and to W0CG for the emergency TIC-Ring motor.
Also thanks to K8AJS, K8MFO and N8TR for their help with raising the 40 beam
back into position.
Here are some assessments of conditions:
160 was punk the first night, not much propagation to Europe. We did snag
three new EU mults at the end of the contest at our sunset to help ease some of
the pain. We did notice that the East Coast guys were calling a lot of CQ's
with no answers on topband as well. That said, we were respectable from W8 on
that band.
80 was good although not as good as we have seen it in the past. We hoped to
get 100 countries here but fell 7 short. We were able to CQ on the band and get
answers from EU both nights Without a god antenna on this band we would not
have been able to make this many QSO's nor get the mults we had.
40 was pretty much great the whole weekend. I started the contest on that band
and we had 100 countries in the log in the first 5 hours of the contest. The
rates were pretty good on the band and signals were very good. It was good to
have the 40 meter beam fixed so that we could rotate it again to pick up needed
mults. If you recall, the beam stopped turning in last year's contest so it
was
challenging to pick up anything in Asia or Oceania. Not the case this year,
the
antenna worked fine. As the old saying goes, "there's no meters like
40
meters."
20, 15 and 10 were outstanding this year. We ran all three bands with great
rates on Saturday. Sunday,10 folded earlier than expected to EU and conditions
on 15 and 20 were not as good as well. We were still able to generate good
rates and easily snag nearly every mult we either found or pulled off the
spotting cluster. It was really fun to also be able to run JA's on all three
bands at the same time. Alas, we could not find a 20 meter mult in Zone 37 for
the last zone on that band. We did work 5H3EE on 15 in that zone but he must
have been a single band entry since we never heard him on any other bands.
Congrats to a great team on a great contest effort. We done K8JM proud!!!!!!!
73...........de Goose, W8AV
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