It’s going down

Declining conditions on the high bands due to the solar cycle have the effect of DX signal levels becoming weaker and openings becoming shorter in general. Thus, operating QRP becomes harder in two ways. The time window to work a certain DX station becomes shorter, i.e. there is more competition from high power stations. Additionally, less bands will be open and stations will concentrate on the ones open. Thus, increasing the competition even further. The result is supposedly much less DX stations and multipliers worked.

So, exactly this happened over the weekend. The final result — 1.7 compared to 2.4 million points last — is down by about one third despite having worked almost as many stations.

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SSB without a Voice

John, W2GD wrote: ‘The other thing you learn operating LP or QRP is you must have perfect timing to overcome the ‘brute force’ advantage of your KW brothers. Sounds simplistic, but this has a huge impact on how well you do breaking pileups. It is a learned skill that takes practice to master.’ Well, he is pretty right. Almost all of the time during this contest I had to operate using the voice recorder of my K3 due to having lost my voice. This hampered the score quite a bit not only because the timing hasn’t been right but also responding to specific questions has been quite a challenge. Additionally, calling CQ myself has been out of question. Last but not least, operating having fever is not much fun…

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Unfortunately, family obligations prevented me from putting in a full effort. So, I just operated about two hours from the DL0BMW club station.

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World Champion

Eventually, the certificate for the IARU HF World Championship 2014 arrived. Now, I can call myself officially a ‘World Champion’.

Just a few QSOs over the weekend and collecting a few QTCs. T32AZ (Eastern Kiribati) has been the highlight on Sunday morning.

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This contest has been some weekend fun during the annual family holidays on the Island of Bornholm, Denmark.

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A Thousand QSOs for the First Time

I arrived @DL2LSM late at Friday bringing my daughter. So she can spend some time with their grandparents while I do the contest. She did the nice picture of me operating. You can clearly see the SO2R setup, namely the two tranceiver, the SO2R controller, and the antenna tuner control box, respectively.

The contest committee introduced additional unlimited categories for all single operator classes. It allows for the use of cluster information. I decided to start in the ‘Single Operator Mixed Unlimited QRP’ category. Although the propagation hasn’t been very favoring I managed to do more than a thousand QSOs during a 24 hour contest.

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Just for Fun

Taking part in the CW FD has been just a casual operation for fun. I tried to call CQ quite often in order to practice my CW skills a bit. So, I didn’t pay to much attention working possible multipliers. Compared to last year the number of QSOs is down by about 10%. Additionally, the number of multipliers is much lower as well. This is mostly due to the fact that the conditions on the high bands — i.e. 10m and 15m — haven’t been very good up here in the north. It has been quite some fun working HZ1FI/P on 80m.

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Getting There

All the contest preparations payed off and I was able to finish with a great result well above the actual World Record. Thus, even despite the fact that the ten meter band hasn’t been a great performer up here in the North.

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And the Plaque goes to…

DM2M operated by DK3WE. Today, I got the news that I won the Assisted All Band QRP Category of the 2014 edition of the CQ WWDX CW contest. UA4Z — who claimed a higher score — was disqualified due to power violations. Thus, allowing me to win my first CQ plaque with a new World Record and leaving me waiting for it to arrive…

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