Tuesday, June 2, 2020

CQ WPX CW contest summary.

Another CQWPX CW contest has come and gone and this year for me it was a parttime effort as the weather was great here and many outdoor "Stuffs" had to be done. I was shocked to see 10m open and I was able to bag 7 contacts there. During my first leg of the contest on Saturday, I found it very hard to contact any Europian stations. I did make one into Ireland and that was it. The second leg of the contest was Sunday and it seemed that Europe had opened up just fine and I was making DX contacts. The only issue during the short time I was taking part in the contest was the XIT issue which I posted about a few days ago. The other issue was right at the get-go of the contest, I was not able to get the N1MM CW macros to key up the Icom 7610. I have been working QSO parties Win4Icom rig control software looks after N1MM+ as 3rd party software. I do this because I can control the 7610 via my mouse using Win4Icom software. So things like band changes, fine filter adjustments, APF on and off and so on. I did not want to play with the issue for too long as I was not really going to be in the contest for all that long. I ended up going back to old school operating.....well almost old school no paper and pencil yet. I shut down Win4Icom and configured the N1MM+ com port to talk directly to the 7610. In minutes I was up and running again.
without issue and not an issue! Most of the time I get on the radio the day before a contest and test out the rig, software and keyer to make sure all is well.....guess what I failed to do the day before this time? My setup is as follows, I use
Below is the contest breakdown:
20m          73 contacts
15m          20 contacts
10m            7 contacts
Total      100
Score 18,778
WPX        83

4 comments:

Paul Stam PAØK said...

Hi Mike, nice contacts with CW. With WSPR I have spots from Canada and the east coast USA late in the evening around 23 UTC with 200 mW on 20 meter band. 73 Paul

MadDogMcQ said...

Well it all turned out well in the end Mike. Some fab contacts there. I sooooo wish I could learn morse, but the learning seems like too much of a commitment right now.

73, Tom, M7MCQ

VE9KK said...

Good evening Paul and very nice to hear from you, it seems that 20m is hopping and around a time when I would have thought it was dead. I was shocked to make the contacts that I did on 10m but when a contest is on there are contacts to be made on all bands. It goes to show you that the bands are open but just no one is calling CQ.
73,
Mike
VE9KK

VE9KK said...

Good evening Tom, the contest did turn out well and with my limited time on the air I did very much enjoy myself. As for the code it does take some time to learn but you can go at your own pace it will just take a bit more time to get it down. I really enjoy the code as it's like learning another language.
73,
Mike
VE9KK