No radio activity here since Easter. Had a marker in my calendar that JIDX-CW would be this past weekend. Wasn’t in the mood to participate on Saturday, thoughts were rather in a QRL project I’m handling right now. Also saw on the cluster that condx must have been awful. Sunday morning saw me in better mood so I switched on the radio. Heard some weak JA signals on 10 m so gave it a go there. Some of the JA1’s and 4’s were rather loud (meaning S4-5) but most of the JA’s were down in the noise making it serious weak signal work. But I like a challenge every now and then. 😉
JIDX CW Contest Call: DH8BQA Class: SOSB/10 HP QTH: JO73ce Operating Time (hrs): 3 Summary: Band QSOs Mults ------------------- 10: 45 24 ------------------- Total: 44 24 Total Score = 2,112 Comments: Elecraft K3, KPA500 + 6 ele OWA Yagi
After all it should be good enough for the country win again. 😉 Last year’s condx were even worse and I made only 13 QSOs but that was enough to win 10 m DL … being the only DL participating. 😀
Besides the few contest QSOs I used some time to further “test-drive” the new WARC antenna. Although condx were rather bad the JA’s on 5WØ (Western Samoa) were some easy catches on 12 & 10 m CW. Amazing as the path is almost directly over the Northpole! ZL7E on 15 m RTTY was a new digital DXCC country, nice. Easily working some good Caribbean DX like HK, 8P, ZF, FM, YV, etc. late in the evening (almost local midnight here) on 18 MHz was much fun, too. A 2 ele *is* good bang for the buck! 😎