CQ WW SSB 2023 CQ3W 10m

1. November 202318. März 2024 DF7EE 0 Kommentare

Here we go again! Collecting CQ WW Plaques for the last 5 years straight I was courious if I can add another one to the wall.

I really love the 10m band – maybe because it has the most space and I hate frequency fights or not beeing able to pick weak signals because it is splattering from both sides. A russian OP once said: “This is not splattering, it is contest!!”

Everyting starts with a calm and on time flight from Frankfurt to Madeira. (Not flying TAP anymore really helps) I arrived at the station Tuesday and started the usual setup process. Everything worked out and I had three antennas for 10m at my disposal. Antenna one is a spider beam @ 18m for EU, two is a 3 Band Beam on 22m for the US and the three was a 4 element Monobander for Mults and south america. All connected by stackmatch. I had my IC-7300 travel companion with me and a new headset for test! More about this later…. Legal limit was provided by one ACOM 2000A amp. Setup went very quick and I used wednesday to put up a 60m and 80m antenna as well. Just for some casual fun before and after the contest.

Pic: Spider Beam and 4 element

Thursday and Friday I had time to relax and make some casual QSOs on sideband and FT8.

On 10m the contest really starts early saturday morning here in Madeira. Band started to open and I logget the first few QSOs, but wait – after hitting enter, the QSOs did not sit in the list of DXLog as usual – they simply disapeared! PANIC MODE ON! Spent 3-5 minutes trying to understand the problem, but failed. I logged some 500 QSOs before in DXPedition mode and it worked fine. I quickly decided quit on DXLog and made a fresh setup with N1MM! The whole glitch costet me maybe 15 to 20 minutes and 3-5 QSOs that I had lost. 🙁

After everything worked some rates started to pick up. Most hours well above 200 QSOs/h but nothing record setting fast. I had to call CQ inbetween or move frequeny – never once in the whole contest I could catch “the perfect hour”.

In march CQ WPX I did 10m as well and had two PY stations in front of me after the test – so I had that strong feeling I need to grind the whole time. No time for relax and breaks – no pizza – just grinding QSOs into the log for about 14h straight till the band really died down. 2900 QSOs and 1.2 M if i remember correctly. I used the dead band for food, optimizing the N1MM setup and sleep.

Alarm clock early morning – check dx maps – propagation not here yet as it looks like. A short peek at online score and there it was: PV2G 250k points ahead of me PANIC MODE #2 !

The only solution was to overtake him while he is sleeping, catch all mults possible and create a gap for the hours where he will be strong in south america and the band is out in Madeira. In other words – keep grinding QSOs again!

The band dies in Madeira about four hours before the end of the contest and I was able to create “some” gap to PV2G, but whenn I peaked again at online score around 20:00 it was very close – TO CLOSE! Instead of waiting – I tried to squeeze any QSOs I could get. Calling 20 times for one PY or LU QSO or looking for a saving mult. The last four hours were 36, 23, 20 and 5 (!) QSOs. PV2G was comming closer and closer but the 24:00 end of play bell rescued me!