Below are the results of my entry in this year’s ARRL DX CW Contest, this time on 80 m as our GP antenna was still up and I felt fit enough for the nightshifts. The “fit enough” has been confirmed, no signs of weakness at all during the weekend. 😎
I had laid down before the start of the contest and set the alarm clock for half an hour before the “show” should begin. Got up in time, made some coffee, started on time, found a good frequency, had a nice rate, all fine! All too good to be true? At some point looked at the clock and thought “wow, these first 1,5 hours went really fast”. Wait, can that really be? It didn’t feel that long, right? Looked again, checked the alarm clock and grrrr, what an idiot I am! 🙁 Instead of 0:30 local (contest starts at 1:00 local time) it was set to 1:30 local, i.e. 0:30 UTC. Damn, wasted the first hour and probably lost some 40-50 QSOs as it was really good at the beginning!
Mults worked
Apropos how it was: The first night was amazingly good with 270 QSOs, albeit no further west than W9 and 2x WØ and a single W7 (Southern Arizona). Saturday we got hit by Aurora condx. 🙁 Propagation completely down, only a few on CQ, even less new ones to be found on S&P and of course nothing further west again. The 3 or 4 additional WØ’s were in the eastern of the Midwest states and really weak, i.e. difficult to copy, and also just one additional W7 from AZ who made it into the log. A real pity having that great antenna available, but it is like it is. The third night = maybe one additional useful hour to operate … well, under these condx I simply skipped it. 😉
ARRL DX Contest, CW - 2021 Call: DH8BQA Class: SOSB/80 HP QTH: JO73ce Operating Time (hrs): 27 Summary: Band QSOs Mults ------------------- 80: 464 39 (including dupes) ------------------- Total: 439 39 Total Score = 51,363 Comments: FLEX-6600, PA + 80 m GP