CQ WW DX CW contest 2019

No lack of action

The CQ WW DX  CW contest this weekend was the first contest as VE9KK unfortunately, most of Saturday and into the evening I was not feeling well at all. I gave the contest an off and on again effort during this time. Sunday was a very late start as I wanted to get my rest to get over this bug I had.  In summary, the weekend went as follows:

        Band     QSOs     Pts  ZN   Cty  Pt/Q
           7       6      18    3    5   3.0
          14      10      29    6   10   2.9
          21       2       5    2    2   2.5
       Total      18      52   11   17   2.9


            Score: 1,456

I found Sunday to be a tough one my signal was just not being heard and I am guessing it was just the propagation? The few times I was on the radio on Saturday I had no issues making contacts. Some of the bonus things here at VE9KK were:

- The new Astron power supply worked just fine. 

- I was able to work Europe on 40m which never happened at the old QTH with the MFJ 1788 antenna. 

- Speaking of antennas it was a joy to use the End fed antenna, I was able to change bands without returning. The magloop I used for so long had to be re-tuned on the same band and for sure on band changes. 

- On Saturday (when I was on) I was able to get into Europe, Central America and South America without issue. 

During my time on Sunday during the contest I was greeted with an on screen message that N1MM+ stopped working as it was not able to communicate with com3. Com3 is my CAT control for the Icom 7610 and in a nutshell, this meant I was having RFI issues with one or more of my USB cables. I thought I had solved this issue already with snap on chokes?? I had a fast glance at the snap on chokes an noticed some had "un-snapped". I shut things down and spent well over an hour to fix the situation once and for all!! More on that later this week in another post. I restarted the rig and software and did a few tests and I was good to go, but the bands did not seem to want to co-operate. Having said that the bands sure were alive with opportunity. I heard nothing from the south pacific or Asia. Overall, I had a great time while in the chair at the radio and am looking forward to other CW contests.