Initially I wanted to drive to the station but motivation was rather low so only handed out a few points remotely last weekend. Spent most of Saturday afternoon on 10 m with some Sporadic-E to CT/EA and prolongation of propagation to South America every now and then. Not the best strategy for a higher result but more fun for me. 😉
20 m was really awful. A stack of 2-3 stations almost everywhere. Never felt so QRP like this time. If 5-600 watts into a 4L yagi don’t cut it how frustrating must it be for LP and QRP stations? Even calling the big ones with good signals while S&Ping was frustrating needing to wait in line. Calling CQ myself was chanceless … 80 & 40 m worked out much better, enough “local” (i.e. European) “food” to work. 😉
CQ WPX SSB Contest - 2020 Call: DH8BQA Class: SO(A)AB HP QTH: JO73ce Operating Time (hrs): 21 Summary: Band QSOs ------------ 160: 30 80: 213 40: 301 20: 112 15: 2 10: 64 ------------ Total: 722 Prefixes = 456 Total Score = 618,792 Club: Bavarian Contest Club Comments: FLEX-6600, Elecraft KPA500, 160m loop, 80/40 m dipoles, 20 m 4L YU7EF Yagi, 15/10 m 6L G0KSC OWA Yagis each
A more serious entry is planned for WPX-CW at the end of May. 😎
Unfortunately we encountered some serious interstation interference! 🙁 Uwe, DL3BQA, was doing a 15 m entry and as soon as he was pointing the beam to the shack and 10 m antenna (i.e. dir South America) we had big interference on 10 m!
Really strange as antennas for both bands are more than 50 m apart, distance from 15 m beam to the shack is more than 50 m, too, and there’s no frequency relationship between the 2 bands! And the combo 15 + 10 m used to work perfectly well during the last few years! So something we really have to dig into urgently during the next few weeks and sort it out as it took away quite some fun. 🙁