ARRL-DX-CW 2018

Another contest in the books. 😉 Enjoyed operating the ARRL CW contest once more. Condx were not too good, i.e. 15 m only opened marginally and very spotty …

Started about 4 hours into the contest but found even low band condx Saturday morning to be sucking so decided to go to bed again and just continue on 20 m as a single band entry later on. 20 m was quite okay on Saturday although only a hand full of West Coast QSOs made.

It was only Saturday evening that I recognized that there are no Single Band Assisted categories in ARRL-CW but Single Operator Unlimited only exists as an Allband category … oh well, I should start reading the rules before the contests again. 🙁 So I spent another few hours on the low bands, too, and sent my log as SOU as I was using cluster assistance …

Second night started quite okay on 40 m, it opened quite early. Decided to take a small nap during the night and get up early again for more low band DX but as it seemed the MUF was even below 7 MHz as I didn’t hear many stations on Fourty and no response on my CQs either. Also skimmer reports were bad to non-existing. So went down to 80 m and signals were much better there. Had some fun running although QSO rates were not too high. But worked a lot more multipliers on 80 m than on 40 m! Think I even worked 2 all-time new states for me on Eighty. 😎

Continued to operate on 20 m on Sunday and grabbed a few more Q’s on 40 m early evening to get the band total above 100, too, then quit and went back to the family. 🙂

                    ARRL DX Contest, CW

Call: DH8BQA

Class: SO Unlimited HP
QTH: JO73ce
Operating Time (hrs): 18:45
Remote Operation

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
-------------------
  160:    5     5
   80:  101    37
   40:  101    29
   20:  506    52
   15:   27    14
   10:    0     0
-------------------
Total:  740   137  Total Score = 304,140

Club: Bavarian Contest Club

Comments:
Elecraft K3 + K3/0 mini remote head, KPA500 @550 watts,
160m lazy loop, 80/40m dipoles, 20m 4L YU7EF, 15m 6L G0KSC
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