This past weekend saw the annual Worked All Europe (WAE) DX CW contest take to the bands. I was hopeful of snagging a new one or two in the course of giving away a few points over the two days on the contest.
My operating was very much on an ad hoc basis and amounted to around 4 hours spent tuning around 40, 20 and 15m in search and pounce mode.
Conditions weren’t great and no new ones were worked. The closest I came to a new one was when finding a Chinese station under a mini pile-up on 20m on Saturday morning. He was weak and I was only running 25 watts but I spent a while trying for a contact with no success. Mindful of limited time on the bands I soon tuned away to see what else was about.
Highlights of the contest for me were 5K1R (Colombia) on 15m and 20m and A65BD (United Arab Emirates) on 20m. I already have both of these countries worked but I need QSL cards for both. As both stations have European QSL managers I’m optimistic of getting cards for both this time. Interestingly A65BD is already confirmed on LoTW as I type, only 7 hours after the competition closed!
Dean Amateur Radio 5K1R, A65BD, CW, LoTW, WAE
I spent a few hours in total on 40/20/15m giving away a few points and logging about 60 contacts in total. I wasn’t trying to rack up a score and on that basis there were many stations I might have worked that I chose not to call, passing up the more common entities and tuning the bands looking for stations located in more remote or less common entities.
The highlight was the previously mentioned (see previous blog entry) VP2MNK in Montserrat (on 20m) for an all time new one. In addition I worked another 26 countries (24 on 40m, 8 on 20m and just the USA on 15m) including Austria, Belarus, Canada, the Canary Islands, Corsica, Finland, Greece, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Morocco, Serbia and Slovenia.
Dean Amateur Radio contest, RTTY, WAE
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?
Dean Amateur Radio antenna, contest, CW, propagation, Solar Cycle 24, sun spot, WAE