First time switching on my own equipment after some 3 weeks. Spent 2 hours last night on 80 m working the Scandinavian Activity Contest on CW. For Non-Scandinavian stations it’s pretty much a Search & Pounce contest only. Thank god for skimmers! 😉
40 m did not even produce a handful of QSOs, either condx sucked or skip/dead zone was so big it just included all of Scandinavia which might well have been the case (the very farthest point is not more than 2.000 km from my location). I did work 2 Cuban special event stations easily so think it’s rather been a matter of skip zone.
Sunday morning was more productive on 40 m. You could really feel how skip zone got shorter and shorter by time then even allowing QSOs over just 300 km. So spent another 3 hours in the contest albeit with some interruptions. It’s nice to see they have a special low-band class for stations like myself who are too close to get anything seriously done on the high-bands (although this was not a serious entry either, hi).
From the log robot:
DH8BQA - NON-SCANDINAVIA EU DL Band QSO Points Multipliers ------------------------------------ 80m 83 83 30 40m 99 99 37 20m 0 0 0 15m 0 0 0 10m 0 0 0 ------------------------------------ Total 182 182 67 Dupes: 0 Invalid: 0 QSO Total: 182 Score: 12.194 (Diff: 0) CATEGORY: SINGLE-OP-ASSISTED LOW-BAND HIGH (NONE)
Heard some good DX signals on 10 m Sunday afternoon although only path’ to the South yet. Keeping fingers crossed condx will improve a bit for next weekend’s WWDX-RTTY. By tradition it is Uwe’s, DL3BQA, contest. He will certainly go for a single band entry so I’ll try to do a few QSOs on the remaining useful bands then hoping it will be more fun than last year’s contest.