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Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Did well !!

CQ WPX SSB 2013 is over ...

It was the first time I ever entered a contest running SB on 80m, but I enjoyed every bit of it.
80m is a very interesting band, from the aspect of participation. It is not as easy as 20m or 10m, nor does it have similar traffic, but putting a serious effort on 80m pays off.
I entered the Assisted Low Power category, with my FT-2000 pushing out merely 91 watts into my 27,5m Inverted-L, which in its current final position hears well and ... proved to go out well, too.
Starting the contest, there was quite some traffic around, so it was not time to call CQ. Until 0430z I gathered mults. I held on calling some CQ until an hour after my sunrise. Second night was quite busy, with rates going up to 80 Qs/hr. Multipliers kept on coming and score was rising rapidly.
Last night wasn't as busy, but almost 3 out of 4 QSOs were still giving me significant multiplier margin points.
Ended up the contest at 2359z with 722 QSOs in the log, 473 total multipliers and my final score read 836737 points. Not too bad for an 80m rookie @ 100w.

Best 3 highlights of my participation were:
  • Working 2 new ones on 80m, T48K and 4M5W !!
  • Being able to keep up a running frequency at 3795 for almost 2 hours with 91w output and in between being called by 2 very strong JAs !!
  • It was the first time I ever worked so many North Americans on 80m at once !!
For the time being, 3830 score rumours give me a 1st place WW, but we'll have to wait longer till it is stabilized ;-)
Congratulations to 3Z8T, 9A3B, 9A5Y and DR1D for their great scores in the respective High Power category.

A BIG THANKS must go to all my fellow Greek hams that gave me a call during the contest. Those were:

SV1ENM, SV1LK, SV1KWA, SV1ME, SV1NJW, SV1HKH, SV1FJA, ZA/SV1MNH, SV1ENX, SV2DFK, SV3DVO, SV3ICL, SV3QUB, SZ3P, SV5AZP, SV5KKU, SV7LWI, SV7CUD, J47X, SV9GPV and SV9COL.

All contest audio has been recorded and will be available at my online searchable contest audio database (www.sv5dkl.eu/Audio) quite shortly. Stay tuned...

73s to all and CU in the CW leg in May.
 

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