Loosing the Mood

Operating SSB during times of low solar activity is not much fun. However, I took the challenge again and eventually lost the mood to go on to the bitter end.

Preparation:
I still haven’t find a well suited second antenna for 80m and 40m. So, my father, DL2LSM, and myself built a 80m full size quad horizontal loop at a height of about 8 to 10m. Well, it is called quad loop because it is supported by four different trees a birch tree, a pine tree, a maple tree, and a oak tree, respectively. Supposedly, it should give some additionally gain for short to midrange stations.

Operation and Result:
As usual, I started about two hours into the contest. Conditions on the low bands have been kind of Ok but not great. There haven’t been a lot of US stations on 40m and 80m I have been able to work. However, 20m opened late morning into the US and even 15m provided quite some entertainment. The only QSO I worked on 10m has been VR2ZQZ who called CQ quite lonely with a quite good signal. Otherwise the band has been dead.

The second night I slept a couple of hours and worked about till noon on Easter Sunday with an hour break for Easter breakfast and searching for the Easter eggs :-). I wanted to take another break for the family lunch. However, my wife disliked the idea of further concentrated operating. So, I called it a day being quite sad with only about 600 QSOs in the log. I would have had another ten hours of operating ahead. I guess this would have been giving me at least another 250 QSOs.

The quad loop gave some improvement for certain signals. However, it needs further investigations to judge its value.

Outlook:
Thanks everybody for pulling my signal out of the noise. I’ll be back for the CW portion of the WPX and hope to finish which a much better result.

Preliminary Result:

Call: DK3WE
Class: SO All Band QRP
Rig:   K3 (5W) + K3 (5W)
Ant:   2x20m double zepp @13m, spider beam @14m, 80m quad loop @9m 
QTH:   @DL2LSM, JO61GH

Summary:

Total Score:  1322 * 405 = 535.410

Band   QSO    WPX   Points   
---------------------------
160     24     17      40
 80    115     88     236
 40    125     72     270
 20    185    127     339
 15    152    100     434
 10      1      1       3
---------------------------
Total  602    405    1322

Downloads:

• Log (submitted)