CQWW Phone is on this weekend. SOTA Stations on Phone (and possibly CW if bandplans are ignored) are likely to find it hard to make themselves heard to Chasers over the top of Contest Operations taking place until 2359z Sunday night.
73 Phil
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The CQWW contesters are acting like animals over here in Central Europe stepping on each other and everyone else. There are sections of the upper part of the bands where contest operation should be avoided (14.300-350) which are overrun with contest stations.
There’s a couple of DXpeditions out as well with their following, trying to survive in the quadmyre of bad contesters.
That combined with the fact that propagation is nothing to write home about with the third G1 level storm in two days and even the option of moving to the WARC bands isn’t great.
Time for some VHF/UHF SOTA perhaps ?
73 Ed.
I managed a couple SSB QSOs today. It was bedlam so I stuck to CW because it was the only way to hold a frequency. Sorry SSB only people, 5W and a simple antenna is not going to cut it in CQ WW SSB.
The car was parked in the shade for my last summit, you learn to do that down here in the Camargue! Still it said 23C when I got bag and it was still saying 22C when I parked up back “home”.
Yes, in these Southerly latitudes, it’s important finding a parking spot in the shade. If you plan to be parked for a number of hours, since the Sun moves, sometimes you need to park in the Sun thinking on the Sun movement and estimating where the shade will be in by the time you expect to be back at the car.
I heard you making SSB S2S with Juerg HB9BIN (IIRC) on 40m SSB in the middle of the CQ WW contest and on the very same frequency where GM8OEG/p had been spotted and was activating, although I could barely feel him without really being able to understand well enough for a good QSO. It’s good that you later came down to CW and we made a very good 2x599 QSO without the contest QRM. Thank you!
73,
Guru
Hi Ed, I agree with you, it is simply a disaster for QRP activators to fight such odds, nor QRP frequencies are kept free, today I had to activate my OK / OL-055, completely omit the 20 m band, there was no chance at all to find free frequency !!!
73 David
Tried a windy and cold one pointer today.
Couldnt spot as no cell signal and my inreach is not set up yet.
Had to qualify with contest stations, G???, G4???, G4Y???, G4YT?, G4YTD, 5/9!
VHF For tomorrows fun I think, leave HF to the KW + Multi Yagi stations.
73
Tim
After long breake I used yesterday my old friend HB-1B.
Everything was fine but on the final stage of activation during try to copy VE2JCW I got QRM from two oms who used SSB for friendly conversation somewhere near to 14.062.
Possibly they escaped there from the contest but I met such “idea” for the first time …
73, Jarek
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Au contraire Rodney, au contraire.
With my 5w (FT-817) and simple antenna (homemade quarterwave groundplane) yesterday, I had a very successful activation on 20m SSB.
On the summit of The Cloud G/SP-015, I operated for about an hour and a half, making 50 QSOs, all 20m SSB.
DX:
Asia (1): 5B4
Africa (4): 3V, CN, EA8, EA9
North America (8): VE, W
I then went over to Gun G/SP-013 and struggled to eventually persuade two stations to talk to me! 20m SSB was definitely the winner for me!
Yes Tom, black is white.
20m/40m was buzzing and as long as I was happy to say “5914” to every QSO partner I too could have worked hundreds. But I wanted SOTA QSOs where I was the DX.
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Doh, you caught me out. I was hoping no-one would notice and I’d get away with that one.
In any case, “5914” is about twice as much as I normally say to my QSO partners, and so bordering on conversational for me 
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My experience for the last 50 years or so is when there’s a major SSB contest, go on CW. When there’s
a major CW contest, go on SSB. Works for me.
73, John, K6YK
Probably not produced too many top ten results in the contests though…
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Ha!
You are so right. I was referring only to SOTA, or non-contest DXing activities.
k6YK
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