This time a part time participation only. While driving the 700 km to the station Thursday night I somehow caught a painful tonsilitis. 🙁 Waking up Friday morning I already had a sore throat. Fever and shivers added during the day so I went to bed 6pm local time Friday evening already at the contest station. After 11 hours of sleep I woke up Saturday morning and started into the contest. But motivation was quite low due to the ongoing pains so it was rather search & pouncing the bands, catching some mults, a.s.o. And I was sure happy this was not an SSB contest. 😀
Low band condx seemed to be quite good, caught some nice DX multipliers. During the day I got more or less used to the pains so also started some running on 20 m and enjoyed great runs (for an average German guy, hi) on 40 m later on. 15 m opened shortly to the U.S., too, but activity could have been a little better. 10 m provided more QSOs than expected, there were a few smaller ES openings but also a good number of contacts made through Meteor reflections. Went to bed with 1.000 QSOs under the belt at 2z Sunday morning.
Continued operating later Sunday morning and also enjoyed some nice runs on 20 m later on when the band started to open to North America. When seeing 1.5 million points were in reach I kept pressing. After reaching that goal it was only 80 more QSOs to the 1.500 QSOs mark so I again kept my butt in the chair a little longer. 😉 But afterwards called it a day, packed up and went back to town to join my mother’s birthday party …
CQ Worldwide DX Contest, CW Call: DH8BQA Class: SO(A)AB HP QTH: JO73ce Operating Time (hrs): 25 Summary: Band QSOs Zones Countries ------------------------------ 160: 142 9 49 80: 220 14 62 40: 452 33 112 20: 452 27 107 15: 184 28 82 10: 52 5 23 ------------------------------ Total: 1502 116 435 Total Score = 1,581,370 Club: Bavarian Contest Club Comments: IC-7300, PA + our usual antenna farm: 160m lazy loop, 80/40m dipoles, 20m 4L, 15/10m 6L yagis each
Was using the IC-7300 again. The bandscope was a real benefit on 15 & 10 m. I could immediately see when new signals popped up – great value! On the other hand I had the gut feeling it’s RX was desensed a few times on the low bands, especially on 160 m. Something to keep an eye on. All in all I still prefer the K3 for Contesting simply because you have the more important controls directly at hand, i.e. filter bandwidth, speed control, etc. Being able to set the drive power per band is another big plus, too. I needed to fiddle with the power adjustment regularly as I need different drive powers with my PA depending on band and antenna (SWR). A ‘homemade’ challenge was switching all the stuff around the shack manually. We have a high degree of station automation but it’s all centered around Elecraft & Kenwood radios, I still have to implement Icoms somehow. 😉 Nevertheless the ‘7300 coped quite well in general and is really good value for the money! It’s big plus compared to the K3 certainly is the single USB connection to have all set for CAT control, audio, etc. The K3S has the same functionality and I was already thinking about buying the new KIO3B board to add that functionality to my old model K3, too. Or maybe buy a new K3S and put the current K3 into (additional) service at the remote station? Or maybe I should also take a look into the Flex Radio series … 😉