Another contest in the books. 😉 Enjoyed operating the ARRL CW contest once more. Condx were not too good, i.e. 15 m only opened marginally and very spotty …
Started about 4 hours into the contest but found even low band condx Saturday morning to be sucking so decided to go to bed again and just continue on 20 m as a single band entry later on. 20 m was quite okay on Saturday although only a hand full of West Coast QSOs made.
It was only Saturday evening that I recognized that there are no Single Band Assisted categories in ARRL-CW but Single Operator Unlimited only exists as an Allband category … oh well, I should start reading the rules before the contests again. 🙁 So I spent another few hours on the low bands, too, and sent my log as SOU as I was using cluster assistance …
Second night started quite okay on 40 m, it opened quite early. Decided to take a small nap during the night and get up early again for more low band DX but as it seemed the MUF was even below 7 MHz as I didn’t hear many stations on Fourty and no response on my CQs either. Also skimmer reports were bad to non-existing. So went down to 80 m and signals were much better there. Had some fun running although QSO rates were not too high. But worked a lot more multipliers on 80 m than on 40 m! Think I even worked 2 all-time new states for me on Eighty. 😎
Continued to operate on 20 m on Sunday and grabbed a few more Q’s on 40 m early evening to get the band total above 100, too, then quit and went back to the family. 🙂
ARRL DX Contest, CW Call: DH8BQA Class: SO Unlimited HP QTH: JO73ce Operating Time (hrs): 18:45 Remote Operation Summary: Band QSOs Mults ------------------- 160: 5 5 80: 101 37 40: 101 29 20: 506 52 15: 27 14 10: 0 0 ------------------- Total: 740 137 Total Score = 304,140 Club: Bavarian Contest Club Comments: Elecraft K3 + K3/0 mini remote head, KPA500 @550 watts, 160m lazy loop, 80/40m dipoles, 20m 4L YU7EF, 15m 6L G0KSC
). He had to QRT Sunday afternoon already due to heavy snow storms on his hill-top QTH and missed the South America opening but it was not enough for me to catch up. Less aluminium, less power and a much worse QTH overhere … good to have excuses! 😀
This year we decided to visit Bonaire, PJ4, in the Dutch Caribbean for some holiday style DXpedition as well as participating in CQ WWDX CW at the end of the month. Paul, DL5CW, and Tom, DL5LYM, will travel to Bonaire on Thursday and stay for 3 weeks while my YL and I will join them end of next week and stay for 2 weeks. So expect some activity from PJ4/DL5CW, PJ4/DL5LYM and 
After hearing about it on Wednesday evening and knowing most of it would be earth directed it was clear there would be some radio Aurora around about 48 hours later. That’s the time it needs to travel from sun to earth to then hit our planet’s magnetic field (which is protecting us from the rays’s effects mostly) and produce Aurora. I took care to be able to get home from QRL today a little earlier than usual at the moment, i.e. not working 11-13 hours a day. When I saw the first Aurora spots appearing on the DXcluster I called it a day at QRL and went home to join the fun.