Sunday, June 11, 2023

WWSA Results

Somehow I must have overlooked this, but the WW South America CW Contest just ended and I only got to work CW for a few hours between yesterday afternoon and early morning.

I had to puzzle out what this contest was -- I heard stations calling CQ TEST but I had to scan the calendar to piece together which contest they were working. There were several going on at the same time.

I think it was another station calling CQ SA that gave me the hint I needed.  Anyway, I scanned the calendar again, downloaded the rules and figured out what to do with N1MM to program it for processing callsigns.

So that's exactly what I did and as a result I worked 54 stations.  Not a lot, but the band wasn't doing too well and there weren't a lot of DX stations on the band to begin with.  I think I only missed about 15% of the stations that were actually in the spot network (which means stations that other WA/CA spotters identified -- I'm sure there were hundreds of more DX out there -- but I couldn't hear them anyway).

The N1MM summary is as follows:

Contest: GACW
 Band     QSOs     Pts   ZN  Cty  Pt/Q
     7       2       7    2    2   3.5
    14      34     101   10   23   3.0
    21      18      60   11   12   3.3
 Total      54     168   23   37   3.1
Score: 10,080
1 Mult = 1.0 Q's

The DX I did work helped overall my CQ DX Marathon numbers for those bands.  I could have worked more stations if it only had more stations calling CQ.  It was really slim.   The JA's that came on the band (15 and then 20m) were nice because they padded the log and also they were the strongest I heard throughout the whole time.  Good copy on them.

(As a diversion, I did work a bit of off-contest QSO on CW that could not be counted in the WWSA -- and I also tried to look at FT-8 when the band really fell through the floor around 1am.  More CQ DX Marathon points to add).

Back to the CW around 2 am.

At around 2:30 am Pacific I had to pull the plug and get some sleep.  I could have stayed up and worked until the end of the contest at 1500Z today (Sunday June 11, 2023) but it's OK.  I will work more CW later.   

I noted before that I have not twisted the microphone down to speak in the Heil Pro-7 headset for as much as I thought I would.  I've been working as much CW as I can -- dropping my call to all the CQ I hear that are reasonable strength and working the bands fully from 80m to 10m.  (I wish 10m was a bit more active, because I have a nice 10 meter antenna I want to use more -- a mono-band for 10m).

In any event, the contest was really fun and I gained a few more bits of confidence in ad-hoc CW QSO fills as the case needed.

The S/P mode of N1MM sort of removes the anxiety because all I need to do is listen to the call being offered to check the spot and I can do that at high speeds.  But if I were to "Run" (which I did for a bit of time), I have to be prepared for anything.. I actually got a call from a BH2 and that was interesting copy since they were really low in the noise.

Enough of that.  Hope you had a good effort in the WWSA.

Thanks.


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