The biggest CW Contest in the year is taking place now until 2359 on Sunday 25th November reducing the chance of chasers hearing activators on the main HF bands due to the QRO QRQ Contesters enjoying their contest. Each to their own, live and let live and hopefully some activators will make use of the WARC bands and 60m - the key to success!
No chance of hearing Jarek OK/SP9MA/P this morning on 7022 - 40m will get less congested with contesters after around 0900 when we have full daylight.
Of course the activators could switch to SSB … or even AM… It’s “only” a CW contest and while CW mode is allowed over the complete band in many countries, the CW Ops do tend to stay at the bottom of the bands.
Good luck to the Ops in any case - they way the bands sound at the moment (here) is not good.
I’m going to be helping out at OE6U from 19:00 this evening. Supervising others mainly (and working on my QCX 80 when time allows). I will probably call a bit myself later on. Like you say: if you can’t beat em…
de OE6FEG / M0FEU
Matt
Yes, I did as Tom, M1EYP suggested:
The GMA - aktivation of OE0/BL-1012 during the CQ WWW SSB contest on 26/27.10.2018
brought 12 contest-qsos in my log. First aktivation from OE0/BL-1012 is valid.
Thank you all my chasing Friends for logged QSOs and tries as well.
I “met” two kinds of QRM today:
normal contest QRM
idiotic QRM like on 7027 during my activation of OK/VY-006: one “operator” transmittted only “cq test” without any call then report and “tu”, nobody called him of course but QRM was very irritationg
Tomorrow I will continue my OK/VY trip and will try to use another configuration that I hope will be more effective.
Hope to see a lot of You on the frequencies !
Good evening Phil,
Today was better I guess
Equipment was different and I feel my signals were higher a bit, even some contestmen called me on 40m band
I worked today also on 20m where except Europeans Richard N4EX is logged on two summits, and 30m to escape from contest QRM.
Thanks to Kurt HB9AFI for S2S & thanks to all chasers as well.
Congratulations on an excellent round today in the OK/VY area. I think I managed to match Tonnie’s record yesterday (PA9CW) with 3 chaser QSOs from the 7 summits you activated - I couldn’t copy your signals on another 2 and for another 2 summits I was absent from the shack - shame on me!
In another 90 minutes the CQWW CW Contest will be over for another year, but there are plenty more contests to come this side of Xmas!
I am not sure if your OK/VY tour continues for another day - I see only UK stations listed in the alerts for tomorrow - that is very unusual.
PS Yes Jarek, I think it was P33W (Cyprus) I heard calling you at about 35 WPM this afternoon, he was taking the contest seriously with a callsign like that.
Thank you Phil and hope to see you soon on the frequencies but unfortunately not tomorrow (today ).
I am at home now, in the morning will start my working day.
This contest seems to bring out the worst in CW operation (not a comment about P33W by the way). I worked a selective number of stations from home between other activities and many were obviously fixed to their 30+wpm and had no ability to QRS for those of us that prefer to send (and receive) at 20wpm. Ria N2RJ was a notable exception with her response to my call matching my speed with some lovely sounding rythymical morse. The problem with this contest is there are no serial numbers so all that is needed is a correct callsign - the rest is predetermined. I could have sent utter rubbish each time instead of 59914… I was almost tempted!
Hi Gerald,
As I’m sure you know, in these days, most of the contesters use computer programs for logging and computing the points, multipliers, etc in real time and these programs like N1MM, WINtest, etc are also capable of sending predefined messages by just hitting the Function keys F1, F2, F3, etc. No doubt it’s possible to slow down the transmission speed, but it’s not easy particularly when after several hours of operation a top scorer contester might be dealing with numerous callers at a time and working them at a pace of 4 or even 5 per minute. Sometimes, slowing down or making a QRX pause to listen for a QRS caller with a weak signal is enough to make the pile-up vanish or loose the frequency, because other big gun was sending Kws on a very close frequency trying to kick him off his frequency.
The CQ WW DX contest is sometimes like a big battle and battles are neither friendly nor easy for everyone.
73,
It seemed like everyone I worked just wanted to quickly move on once the minimum details were exchanged for the CQ WW CW DX contest. How did you manage to get anyone to stay for exchanging the details needed for the SOTA activation? Did you have people actually chasing SOTA or just found people willing to exchange some additional info beyond CQ Zone numbers?
What never ceases to amaze me is how when there is a contest running dead bands suddenly come to life with callers everywhere.
Here in the early afternoon 20M is normally stone cold dead. But when a contest is running 20M miraculously comes alive with loads of mostly high speed operators.
