CQ Worldwide DX Contest, SSB - 2022
Call: K2AX
Operator(s): K2AX K3FT AK2S N2SCJ AA3K KI7WX KE2D
Station: K2AX
Class: M/2 HP
QTH: New Jersey
Operating Time (hrs): 46
Summary:
Band QSOs Zones Countries
------------------------------
160: 21 8 10
80: 162 13 55
40: 259 26 77
20: 671 34 104
15: 1282 30 117
10: 1468 28 123
------------------------------
Total: 3863 139 486 Total Score = 6,905,000
Club: Frankford Radio Club
Comments:
This was the first time since 2019 that we had a full crew in the station.
Propagation forecasts looked promising and we were hoping for some great
numbers. Friday night started out very good with 20m being perhaps the most
productive and seeming to stay open later than we expected. We were even able
to use 15m well into the evening. Saturday started off well with 15m and 10m
being the most productive for us. This is the first time I’ve seen 10m be
this productive since I got back into contesting and it was really fun to run
lots of Qs on that band. 15m was a similar story and our total there was ahead
of 10m for a lot of the time. For some reason, we could not get anything going
on 20m. A lot of us were hoping that with 10m being open, some of the stations
would spread out and not all crowd onto 20m. If this ever happened, it was
certainly undetectable to us. 20m was as solid and wall-to-wall as it ever was
with really nowhere to even squeeze in almost all day on both Saturday and
Sunday. What seemed odd was that despite the band being at least as packed as
it ever was (perhaps more so), there were fewer stations being spotted than 15m
or 10m. I don’t know if our QSOs on 20m are down because it seemed more
crowded, because we spent more time on 15m or10m or we didn’t start calling CQ
at 5:00 am (10:00 UTC) before the band was fully opened. It was probably a
combination of the 3. On Saturday afternoon the A index climbed up to 27 which
really put a damper on things, particularly on the lower 3 bands as we headed
into the evening. It quieted down some on Sunday and we effectively doubled our
QSOs on 10m.
The weekend before the contest a bunch of us put up a new 4 element 10m antenna
at 32 ft to face only to the west, a place where we had a blind spot because of
the arrangement of the rotatable 10m antennas we already had. This made it
possible to work VK, ZL, KH6, etc. with just 1 or 2 calls where we struggled in
the past or even had to forgo those mults entirely. Doing a quick analysis of
the log, I estimate that the new 10m antenna produced at least 7 multipliers and
2 dozen QSOs which is about what I had expected it would do. The great thing is
we spent very little time getting these which allowed us to stay productive.
We fell just short of the 7 million point raw score we made last year but I’m
very happy with our effort.
Thanks as always to our hosts, Mark, Donna, and the O'Brien family for the use
of the great station and letting us invade their home for the weekend.
KE2D
Posted using 3830 Score Submittal Forms at: http://www.3830scores.com/
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