A tale

Tale of a brilliant weekend in the CQ WPX SSB contest of 2023,
using HF radios, new and older, with simple 1/4 wave antennas.

All this nearing the peak of sunspot cycle #25 on the upper, “classic” bands of 10 m and 15 m.

What are these things you speak of? Prefixes, contests?

CQ in this case is the amateur radio magazine known as CQ Magazine. As well as publishing said ham radio magazine the publisher also hosts or sponsors several amateur or ham radio contests or events.

Amateur radio stations are identified by an International Call Sign. This is the case for most transmitters in the world, whether broadcast radio, TV, SW broadcasters, aeronautical or maritime stations including aircraft, nautical vessels, and amateur radio stations. The list goes on.

Each country or entity has a recognised pool of ICS beginnings or prefixes. Canada for example has many of the “C”, “X”, and “V” prefixes, however not all of each. Britain has many of the “G” and “M”. Americans dole out many “K”, “W”, “N”, and “A.”

The contest this weekend was a WPX, or World Radio Prefix, contest. The goal was to collect as many unique ICS prefixes as possible and as many contacts as well.

Each unique prefix “worked” gave one a multiplier, used to increase the base count of contacts. So one’s score went rocketing up as one found new countries, entities, or areas of a country!

Sunspots

High Frequency or HF Radio, known to fans of Nancy Drew or The Hardy Boys as “Shortwave two-way radio”, is affected positively by the presence of sunspots, and negatively by the absence of them. CBers (Citizen Band radio users) often call this phenomena “Skip” while hams oscillate between that and the official-ish use of the term Skywave communication.

We’re climbing the peak to effective maximum of Sunspot Cycle #25, and boy is it hot! This is the time of life when small, low powered radios may work very long distances when used appropriately by canny operators.

Bring on the sunspots! Get out, get on the air!

What happened?

While I’m working toward a cool new antenna (some hams are frequently “working on another antenna.” <g>) I’d not finished it in time for this contest. No problem, the sunspots are ticking over, my 1/4 wave, car mounted antennas may work well. The rest is up to my operating knowledge, techniques, and a bit of skill. Patience helps.

Apartment bound I’m HF antenna challenged, ergo the oft used move to mobile or portable operations. Portable is the operation of a station at a temporary, fixed, location (less about recognising that a radio has characteristics that might cause it to be considered movable or portable in nature.) (The term Portable is oft misunderstood or misused by some hams.)

This weekend I chose a nice park parking lot overlooking the Victoria outer harbour. Great views while I played radio contest and soaked up the sun. (pant pant)

I used a Yaesu FT-857D for Saturday, my current go-to radio. While I’d pulled out four antennas, I decided to try and work the 10 metre band for as long as I felt it useful. All Saturday afternoon in fact. What fun!

From the southern end of Vancouver Island, BC I worked as far as the Antipodes of Australia and New Zealand plus many stations in the Caribbean and points in between, including out to Ontario.

Sunday I decided to try a radio I was mildly unsure of. An old friend in the form of my Kenwood (Trio to Europeans) TS-440S. This radio hasn’t been transmitted from since the late ’90s and had experienced difficulties about that time that the model is known for.

I decided to challenge myself with ops this day solely on the 15 metre band.

In fact I stayed on each band for the duration of the day I chose them.

The TS-440S worked sooo well. I found I remembered quite well how it’s functions and features worked and what I had to do to test the antenna and such. It has a series of roofing filters manufactured by INRAD (International Radio) that I’d selected and installed in the early ’90s. The filters and features of the radio were almost fully utilised, my ears and brain for the rest.

Sunday I worked Alaska, many new entities/countries in the Caribbean, and Japan!

The TS-440S is, of my radios, the one with a knob or button for pretty much one task each. I’ve used my FT-817 and FT-857D quite a lot, and was doing well with them in spite of the great use of menus to access some settings or functions. I’d not seen an issue with the radios or use of menus, getting along well enough. I think some of that was it was what I had to use. Using the TS-400S again I now more easily realise what some other hams are speaking of when they indicate a preference for a control for each function.

“Results”

After about six or seven hours of operations over the two days I’d worked 74 stations, several new countries for me (18 overall for the contest period), 22 Fields, 56 Grid Squares, and garnered a claimed score of 11457 !!

That’s a fine quantity of operating karma points.

These may be traded for, or used to, garner fun. <grin>

Logging

This was the first contest, on my own, where I’d really used computer logging. Oh, I’ve used it before, however that was quite some time ago, when the earth was new. Probably ran on MS-DOS or something similar. There are now so many authors, styles of logs, some fitting different purposes better.

The chosen application was GenLog32 by W3KM, Dave Mascaro. I’ve used it and his VHF Contesting log VHFLOG32 quite a bit over the last few years. However this was the first time I’d used it live, during the contest. That earlier experience with it had been to transfer my scrawls on paper to that which the contest sponsor expected. That included entering times and confirming dates.

Well, what a breeze not having to deal with either of those! I didn’t have to mop up after the contest, keep a close eye on the log submission dead lines, regularly kick myself in the pants to get it done, and more. I simply checked the Cabrillo log header and in it went!

I was also able to export an ADIF (Amateur Data Interchange Format) formatted log as well for the following. How cool is that.

Here is a mapped analysis of my ADIF log from this endeavour.

So, get on the air! There are loads of MF/HF contests listed at Bruce WA7BNM’s Contest Calendar site https://contestcalendar.com/