AARC

CQWPX Contest has ended for another year:

We began our setup at 3:00PM Friday, anticipating a relaxing setup with plenty of time to complete all tasks before the official start time of 8:00PM. Our goal was to have at least four antennas operational. We hung a 160 meter dipole from the tree near the scout building across the telephone pole to one of the guys in the repeater tower. We also fixed the 40 meter dipole at the club and used that along with the 20 meter dipole that are in the hamshack. Two verticals were installed. The verticals covered 10-80 meters. We decided to experiment with ground radials on these two antennas. One used 28 non-resonant radials, the other used 40 resonant radials. We ended up with a total of 5 working antennas. We were able to complete all the ‘outside’ work within about 90 minutes.

Next step was to get the 4 radios setup inside the clubhouse and get the laptops networked and configured to the radios. One goal we had for this contest was to experiment with a different logging software package, our initial tests of this software was positive, so we decided we would give it a try. By 6:30pm everything was ready to go. Time to relax for awhile before the contest begun.

At 8PM the contest started and we were off and running. Band conditions were OK, not great but we have seen worse so no one was complaining. Our logging software had began to show some very troubling issues by 11:00PM, but we thought we could work around them, so we continued to operate and try different processes to eliminate the database issues we were experiencing. By 5:00AM in the morning a decision was made to stop using this application and fall back to our proven software, problem was we had about 130 contacts entered already and we needed to import this information into our other logging application. After several failed attempts to import it correctly, our only option was to manually reenter all the contact information manually. After this was completed, all logging problems were resolved, and we continued with the contest. We had no more issues with the logging application.

We made over 300 contacts, for a total score of 113,000+ points. We were pleased with our performance and looking forward to improving on it next year.

We learned several things from this weekends event, Our ground radial experiment was a success, both verticals performed extremely well, better than past contests with either fewer radials or none at all. We compared the dipole performance with the vertical on the same bands, and found both to have advantages, some contacts were several ‘S’ units higher on either antenna. If you have a logging application that you use and it isn’t causing any problems, why change.

Another great part of the weekend was the amount of people that stopped by either to help us setup, operate a station, sit at the station and learn what contesting is all about, or simply stop by and say hello. Thanks to everyone!

73,
Steve
K3BAY