Wow, this was kinda addictive! After I didn’t like it much last year it was indeed great fun to operate the CQ WW RTTY this year. By tradition the contest is reserved for Uwe, DL3BQA. As condx were rather poor before the contest he decided to go for a Single Operator Single Band 20 m entry. Thus I had the chance to do a few QSOs on the other bands. Well, sort of!
With just our standard antennas for the low bands, i.e. dipoles which are located just a few meters from the 20 m beam, I couldn’t do any 40 m without disturbing Uwe on 20 m. Still not a hundred percent decoupled, need to try some coax stubs in addition to our bandpass filters. So only a few QSOs there during the night when 20 m was closed. Likewise with him transmitting on 20 and me listening on 10 m, antennas obviously too close. Not that much of a problem as 10 m did not see much activity and only southern lines where open. Me on 80 m did not produce any interference on 20 m although the dipole is at the same (small) distance as 40 m. But still a lot of RF in the air and Uwe’s PA decided to switch off occasionally due to too high SWR which meant RF from transmitting on 80 m triggered the SWR protection on 20 m as “returned” power became higher whenever I transmitted. Was especially bad on Sunday evening so stopped early and then concentrated on working a few more mults on 40 m every now and then to not disturb him too much.
So I concentrated on 15 m most of the time. Would I have known before condx would be rather good I would have planned some of my Saturday duties differently. 😉 Thus I missed about 7-8 hours of 15 m prime time for a serious single band entry. Therefor I decided to just keep going and putting in a leisurely SOAB(A) entry to max out points for the BCC. 😎 Also did a few QSOs on 20 m after Uwe called it a day but not much to raise otherwise he would certainly not have stopped operating. 😉
CQ Worldwide DX Contest, RTTY Call: DH8BQA Class: SOAB(A) HP QTH: JO73ce Operating Time (hrs): 31 Summary: Band QSOs State/Prov DX Zones ------------------------------------ 80: 248 0 45 8 40: 165 25 66 16 20: 19 5 11 9 15: 774 51 103 34 10: 32 0 17 12 ------------------------------------ Total: 1238 81 242 79 Total Score = 1,273,536 Club: Bavarian Contest Club Comments: Elecraft K3, KPA500 + beams & dipoles
Next big ones will be WAG and CQ WW DX SSB at the end of October. Have holidays inbetween and hope to be able to dig a bit deeper into the interference issues then. While the good (i.e. non-interfering) combinations of 20/15 and 15/10 might still work this year even condition-wise I’m quite sure we’ll have to resort down to the low bands next year, too, when doing parallel single band entries then …