RAC Canada Day Contest - 2023
Call: CJ7RR
Operator(s): VA7RR
Station: VA7RR
Class: SOSB/20 HP
QTH: BC
Operating Time (hrs): 24
Summary:
Band CW Qs Ph Qs CW Mults Ph Mults
----------------------------------------
160:
80:
40:
20: 440 1173 13 13
15:
10:
6:
2:
----------------------------------------
Total: 440 1173 13 13 Total Score = 171,756
Club: Orca DX and Contest Club
Comments:
I did my usual 20 meter single band from the home station for this RAC Canada
Day contest, and this time it played out a bit differently than I thought it
would.
I had planned to take a minimum two hour sleep break, but that never happened,
because 20 never closed - it was productive with good signals for the entire 24
hours of the contest (!) It was open all night to the east coast of both Canada
and the USA, the only issue being that most everyone there was asleep.
It was a different story for the multipliers as well. Normally I'll go into the
second half of a RAC contest needing VY1, VE8, and/or VY0 on one or both modes,
and usually always miss one or two or three of them. This time, by 12Z at the
halfway point, I had logged all mults except VE8 on SSB. I spent a lot of
Saturday cheating the beam to the north, and had just about given up hope when
VE8GEZ called in during the last hour at 2310Z (!).
Throughout the contest it felt that activity from both Canada and the USA was
down quite a bit as compared to previous years, but in retrospect I'm not sure
that this was actually the case. The usual humongous pileup on SSB at the start
did not materialize, and there were rarely any real rate situations on SSB or
CW; however, a comparison with my 20M numbers from previous years shows, at
least to me, that activity was down maybe only a little bit:
Year USA QSOs VE QSOs
2023 1008 425
2021 881 388
2020 945 545
2017 1422 432
The 2020 totals reflect higher than normal stay-at-home activity due to COVID.
Twenty was quite noisy on Friday, with periods of deep and rapid QSB, and some
North American signals were mushy and fluttery. This made for some challenges
to log the callsigns and exchanges.
Many thanks to all for the QSOs.
73,
Gary
VA7RR
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