CQ WW RTTY 2023
After operating CQ WW RTTY from CR3W in Madeira lst year (STORY) I have decided to operate under my own call DF7EE for the famous DX Hotel by DM9EE in Holzminden.
The goals were set:
- #1 in Germany (1000 QSOs)
- Good position in Europe
- try SO2RUN part time
- have some DX in my log
So lets GO!
I arrived at the station around noon on Friday and started preperation right away. I wanted to try SO2RUN but due to the shack layout I could not rearrange radios and screens as I normally would do – so i used ICOM RS-BA1 software on my laptop to access the second radio.
Left RADIO 2 with one N1MM screen (remote) Right main Radio with two screens
I started the contest with a heavy does of S&P to get all the mults in. Sometimes waiting for your turn on a dx station I could work 2-3 mults on the second radio. This was SO2S&P not really SO2RUN, but it worked. I tried running a few times for 3 Point QSOs – but one of 100 DL stations on the band with 100w is propably not the hottes spot at all. Rates were rather poor – so back to S&P.
I managed to put in about 40 hours out of the 48 allowed, but with a ton of short breaks. A broken poti at the rotator 30m up in the air, forced my to turn the antenna manually applying 24V to the PST and visually stoppting at the direction I wanted. Hey – it worked!
One of the biggest takeways from the weekend was ESM (Enter Sent Message) using N1MM is really cool. A pity I have not started this ESM 10 years ago! A game changer!
DX Hotel is a real DX station! With 100w I was able to break quite some decent pileups such as ZL7IO on 3 Bands, Lord How Isl VK9 and some more. Totally worked 109 DXCC’s in RTTY with low power!
DXCC’s worked
DX MAP
What were the culprits?
- Having 20m and 40m on one boom is a downfall. You need this in the morning and afternoons is seperate directions!
- SO2RUN worked (ESM) – but did not establish any good rates unfortunatly.
- With 100w you need a few minutes to break through on many mults.
- reduced sleep did not help the flue to leave my body 🙁
At the end I have more than 1000 QSOs in the Log and 1.8 million points. This is 400k above the current DL record – I hope log checkers will be nice to me. 🙂
Final score 22:00 UTC QRT!
Thanks for all the callers and the DX station that had pations with me! So happy for the ZL7IO QSOs!
RAW score looks like this:
Thanks to Carsten DM9EE to let me occupy his shack – both IC-7851 radios – for the whole weekend! I am back at DX-Hotel for CQ WW CW!
DX Hotel info here: http://dm9ee.de/
Are you interested in contesting? JOIN THE RRDXA!
73
Helmut DF7EE
