Worked All Europe CW contest, August 2009.
I’m not a serious contester but I do enjoy taking advantage of high levels of activity on the bands during contests to check conditions, see how well my antenna is performing, work a few stations and hopefully log a few new ones. To those ends I spent a few hours at the radio over this past weekend during the Worked All Europe (WAE) CW contest. For those who don’t know, this is a contest where Europe works the world and the world works Europe - this means that as a European station I could only work stations outside Europe.
My operating was split over both Saturday and Sunday and my first thoughts on Saturday were that conditions were really not very good. Few stations were heard outside Europe in countries other than USA, Canada and Asiatic Russia, three countries with a high number of high power stations with good antennas. It was much the same on Sunday although it did seem to me that conditions were slightly better than Saturday.
Over the two days of the contest more than two thirds of stations I worked were from either the USA or Canada, several were from Asiatic Russia and I worked 2 stations from each of Cyprus and Uruguay. I also worked a single station in each of Georgia and Kazakhstan.
Stations heard but not worked were from Japan (several), China (2), Brazil (4), Argentina and Cuba (1 each) - of these China would have been a new one for me but despite calling one particularly loud station on Saturday for several minutes he just wasn’t hearing me. This was probably due to the fact I could only hear him because he was running high power into a decent antenna and my antenna wasn’t radiating my 80 watts of CW very well. Oh…and of course the conditions weren’t great!
All in all it was quite a disappointing event due to the lack of variety in DX stations heard and worked. Conditions weren’t great and it was hard work getting through to many stations with my modest power output and compromise antenna. Sun spot cycle 24 - where are you?