CQ WAG - Worked All Germany - Contest 2018

DG7LAN did work his first contest from beginning to the end. That was something. Ok, I have to admit that I slept in between. But just for 1 hour ;) I worked from the rear seat of my Jeep as I often do. The setup was the following:

• ICOM 7300
• Notebook with N1MM (love it)
• manual VCI ATU (mainly to switch between the antennas)
• Kelemen dipol for 80m/40m/20m 35m over ground
• 40m inverted L with automatic tuner (worked well for 80/40 locals)
• Hanuta and CocaCola

There was a total of 881Qs and a claimed score of 216258. But I am sure there are a few 0 scores in the log since I did CW for the first time in contest and most likely messed up some of the exchanges ;) I don't care, room to improve.

My antennas were supported by some really huge trees. Thanks to mother nature! On the pictures you see the dipole with the support point for the inverted L. 

Unfortunately I had to work LOW POWER since I didn't manage to get my 'new' Ameritron AL811H running in time. 

Conclusions:

• N1MM rocks!
• The IC7300 does well in crouded environment and on busy band
• If you put out a strong signal and have a nice run, there is always the one guy that tries to interfere. Thank god, most guys just push a carrier or CW for a few minutes and then move on. Thats easily eliminated by the notch in the 'IF' path. 
• It's ok to sleep an hour at night. The bands got really quiet and there were only stations I worked before. That was close past midnight. 

Bad picture of the dipol

Bad picture of the dipol - hard to see

As one can see, I did some CW in the last 3 hours and had a great run. Many OPs were really patient and some even slew down a little. I love it. 

Upcoming weekend: CQ WW SSB! CU!

CQ WW DX Contest RTTY portable

On Sunday I did participate in the CQ WW RTTY Contest for the first time. I usually don't do RTTY at all so it was kind of challenging to set it all up. In the end it was real fun and I had a few nice runs but most of the time I did S&P. 

The setup was: N1MM with MMTTY, a single USB cable to the ICOM IC 7300, RG58 to the HLA300V, 30m RG58 to my triband dipole at 30m between two huge trees.

After the first testruns holy smoke came out of the HLA300. A capacitor broke into two pieces and so I had to compete with 100W from the Icom. If you own a HLA300 be careful on RTTY! (Pro Tip :D )

After 10 hours of RTTY I went QRT, got down the antenna and drove back home. 

That was a nice contest to prepare for the upcoming CQ WW SSB contest. I now have a list with things to prepare, change and to carry with me. (I.e. a head lamp to get down the antenna in the dark) 

CU in contest! 
73 / Andy

worked over 500 prefixes :)

Worked over 500 prefixes mixed and over 400 prefixes FT8 

The contest last weekend and the use of FT8 helped a lot.

Happy happy happy :)

CQ WW SSB Contest going on!

I was in the Jeep doing the antenna measurements. The band was all crowded by the contest guys. So I decided to make a couple of contacts. During 2h I was able to make more than 80 contacts from the car, including 5 countries I was still missing. A44A from Oman, CT8/W6SD Azores, 9Y4D Trinidad... Great!