Time Out

I'm sure most Radio Amateurs have had, at sometime in their radio lives, periods of, shall we say, inactivity. I mentioned it recently, back in July. What July has in common with October for me is contests; the IARU in July and the CQWW SSB in October.

This is October, and the CQWW (SSB goes without saying, as I barely touch the key) has been taking place over this weekend. My last foray into that contest appears to have been in 2007, and my best DX was Senegal. This year, with all the QRM you get when conditions are good, it's a miracle I got farther than Shettleston. I heard China on 10m, Qatar on a couple of bands, Cape Verde on 20m, a number of weak Japanese stations on 10 and 15 and a couple of stations in the Caribbean. Did I work any of them? No.

I ran the IC-707 on 20 and 40m (where I only worked 2 GMs, 2 Gs and a GW) with 30W, and the TS-590S on 15m, mostly with 30W, and 50W on Saturday morning. I started off with the FT-817 on 10m, but 5W wasn't enough to get through to anyone, it seemed, so I hooked the aerial up to the FT-857D and turned it up to a whopping 25W. What did that lot get me?

I started at 05:45GMT on Saturday morning, but didn't work anything for nearly half an hour. An hour later, and I'd barely got into double figures. It was a struggle throughout the entire weekend to make oneself heard by any station above the splatter, and there was plenty of QSB to deal with, too. Just under 4 hours later, I made a contact outside of Europe for the first time, and it turned out to be UP2L in Kazakhstan on 10m. I followed this by IG9Y, which is the Pelagic Islands, apprently (Lambedusa, etc). I only made another three contacts in the next hour, before I exchanged reports with TF3CW. It's been a long time since I've worked Iceland, so this was my favourite contact from Saturday. After this, it was Europe, North Africa and North America all the way.

Sunday wasn't much different, except that the bands appeared to be a bit more unstable than the day before. It took me most of the day to work not much more than 30 stations. The best was VY2TT on Prince Edward Island. I couldn't struggle on anymore, as most stations I tried to work started off around 59 but faded to almost unreadable. I doubt I was making an impression on their S-meters.

Anyway, I finished with 107 contacts and 39 DXCC Entities (countries). This is the most contacts I have made during a contest for around 25 years, but it doesn't beat that record of 139 QSOs. I didn't actually enter the contest. I'd be too embarrassed.

No, I haven't forgotten about Part 2 of the RSGB Convention blog. I promise I'll do it later in the week (and correct the mistakes in Part 1).