The contest was fun with some great DX QSOs. It has been good reading the reports. Sorry I have taken a while to get to this.
This was the first running of the contest since UK stations have been allowed 1kW so it will be interesting to see if that has made any difference.
Conditions were not wonderful compared to what they have been recently, but were better than many years of course. Comparing with 2013 which popped up in my FB history, QSO counts were down on the marginal bands – 10m and 80m. It felt like we were squeezed at both ends – particularly with propagation to Canada where I had 17 Qs on 10m (only VE5MX west of VE3) and 35 Qs on 80m (nothing west of VE3). ZL Qs were also down with none on 10m and only ZL3AB on 80m.
VK and ZL were workable long-path for hours in the night on 20m but I only found a few stations that I hadn’t already worked. In past years there have been more marginal stations in that propagation window, but conditions were just not good enough for them to be heard this year.
I only had 10 QSOs in a three-hour period in the night, which is worse than many years. If anyone called me on 40 or 80, I asked them to try the other band and was generally successful if I could clearly explain what I wanted them to do. Thanks to everyone who kindly tried another band or two when asked.
Main country counts were:
Canada 243 Qs
Australia 76 Qs
New Zealand 17 Qs
5 Bands QSOs with:
5B4WN 6Y6YI 9H1CG 9H6A G4SGX/6Y G6XX G6HCC GM6XX GW6XX VA1MM VA3AR VA3DF VE1ANU VE3CT VE3EJ VE3JM VE3KI VE3RZ VK2BJ VK2GR VK6T VO2AC XL3T ZF2CA
4 Bands QSOs with:
5Z4VJ VA2IW VA2RAC VA3RAC VE1GN VE1RSM VE2IR VE3BR VE3FH VE3TG VE3TM VE3UZ VE3VHB VE3VY VE3ZI VJ3A VK1PWE VK5WIA VK6NU VL6T VO1HP ZL3AB
Some interesting QSOs with stations who helped with my QSOs and bonus counts:
3B8HK 10m
9N7AA 10m (had to log him but didn’t count)
J38R DXpedition 15m 20m 40m
J35X 10m 15m 20m
KL7IDA 15m (had to log him but didn’t count)
V85NPV 20m
VK4FOMP 10m (Aussie Foundation – great job with 10W Dan)
ZF2LC 15m
ZS6SRC 10m
ZS5XT 10m
Not being assisted, I missed some obvious great QSOs; ZD7BG for example was just never found.
Here are my claimed scores:
BAND QSO BONUS HQ DUP POINTS AVG
———————————
80 48 19 7 2 240 5.0
40 81 36 11 2 405 5.0
20 114 55 14 4 570 5.0
15 105 47 12 2 520 5.0
10 54 34 7 0 265 4.9
———————————
TOTAL 400 191 51 10 2000 5.0
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CLAIMED SCORE: 6 840
Thanks to everyone who ran an HQ station, you added a lot of interest in a less competitive role. Roger M0ORD with G6XX and John GM0OPS with GM6XX were both doing this for the first time and were great with 1000 QSOs between them.
I ran DXlog for the first time in this contest and used two keyboards, which was great for searching on one band while running on another, or when things were quiet, running on two bands. I didn’t have any problems with it. I did keep a paper list of HQs and “travellers”, which was very useful too – thank Andy G4KNO – I didn’t manage to tick them all but quite a lot.
Thanks for all the Qs; see you all next year.
Nick G4FAL (M5DX this weekend)