Xavier, ON4ALY, asked me a while ago if I was interested to participate in the CQWPX CW contest in the team of OP0HQ. It was at the end of my holiday, so I had to do some planning around that, but it could be done. After a lovely 10 days of holiday in the Belgian Ardennes, it was time to move further north to Tielt-Winge to the station of Marc, ON4AMX.

The group is participating in the Distributed/Multi category. Xavier and I would run the 15m station. It was interesting to see how this works. All the computers are connected via the internet, and the operators are spread throughout the country. This offers opportunities to have an in-band grabbing mults where there isn’t really any communication necessary as e.g. in the typical Run & in-band at a multi/multi station where you need to lock-out the other station. And this potentially slows down the running-rate. Another handy thing is when someone has technical problems, someone else can quickly take over and continue.
There were some issues with the master-station getting disconnected and spots not arriving, but this was quickly fixed.

We planned our main time around the usual daylight opening-time for 15m, plus some slack. The antenna was a 2x stacked 6 el 15m yagi at 50m height. Rig a Yaesu FTDX5000 and a PA at legal max.

Conditions were interesting, and operating was a challenge. On Saturday we had to deal with a big thunderstorm which very slowly moved through the country, causing lots of QRN, especially on the lower bands (where the “money” is). 10m was a complete let-down as well that day.
Oddly enough we had contacts from Asia deep into their night, despite the Juliusruh Ionosonde telling us the MUF was low. NA went up and down like a see-saw.

It’s obvious from the spots that Sunday was the better day for us on 15m. And indeed, we caught up. Strangely enough when Xav and I went home (19UTC), an hour later the spots from NA came in a lot stronger that they did at the time we expected them to come. And this is where the power of a Distributed station shows again: other ops took over from their QTH.
As is probably obvious, the gaps here and there were when there was no-one operating, or the antenna was pointing away from the area.

20m was the golden band, that’s for sure. It was open all day and night long. The 10m op threatened to sell his gear and find another hobby, that’s how bad 10m was for him, hi. From the spots it looks like most activity on that band was on Sunday, and probably Es, as it’s mostly spots from EU. But, some SA showed up too.

In the table at contest.run we ended in the top 10. This obviously pending on the final upload of the logs at the CQWPX website.

Sadly enough we had some problems with the Yaesu-rig. On Sunday it started to develop a constant beeping tone. This was the BFO seeping through somehow. It varied in strength and was impossible to filter away. So at various times it made copying weaker stations quite problematic and a lot of repeats were necessary to get the call and/or exchange heard. The station who sent one the frequency were the worst to copy, and the ones who were off were better. Moving the RIT-along sometimes helped as well.
Note (20260601): after some after-contest research by Marc, the problem disappeared after disconnecting the USB-ports and rebooting the PC.

Onwards to next week. Then it’s support-time at OQ2A at the IARU R1 field-day.