From the official website:
Aim: The Marconi Memorial contest HF commemorates the II Century of Radio and its father “Guglielmo Marconi”.
Time to brush-off my contest callsign for a change for this contest, plus I haven’t done a contest from home for a while. The contest is 24 hours but I only wanted to participate on Sunday.
Since I have been messing with my computer, the USB-configuration had gone berserk again. I wanted to use DXLog without the microHam, but could not get it working. Next try was N1MM, but alas, no success either. Well, back to DXLog *with* the microHam. Actually it wasn’t too bad a choice as I could easily control the speed of my keying too. I really start liking DXLog, but I have to stay up-to-date on using N1MM since that is the logging-program-of-choice at the contest-stations where I guest operate, and the program adds new features all the time. Would be bad if I didn’t know how to use them, hi.
Gear
Using my trusted Elecraft K3s at 100W with the Chameleon whip. I’ve got the SS25 versions which is, as the name suggests 25 feet, or 7.62m for us metric folks. When the whip is fully extended, with the radials, the radiation pattern on 28MHz is more upward and doesn’t favour the for DX more optimal angle of about 7 degrees. So, theorising, I shortened it to 5m, without radials, and let the coax be the counter-poise with a CMC at the radio-side. For 15 and 20m the theoretical model showed also lower radiation angles.
The contest
As usual I started with a bit of S&P to suss the conditions. But they were terrible. Unless it was that there was little participation from the east for this contest? And looking at the uploaded logs, that was indeed the case. But even big-guns like JR6CSY who appeared on the cluster weren’t copyable.
Above the RBN Heatmap for my 2 run sessions at 15m. Only shows reasonable signals in SE Europe, but was expecting some propagation towards TA/VU. But alas, that didn’t happen.
In the last half hour there was some weak propagation to the US. Pity the contest ended just before the build-up of those conditions. But that is always the case with contests, they are never long enough to follow the conditions, hi.
The QSO-map lines up with the RBN-map (no surprise). I ended with 72QSO’s with HA as top-country.
Chasing WWA
Today was the last day of the WWA Sprint, so to help the activators, I chased some of them after the contest. To my surprise I bagged the Indonesian station, 8A1WWA, on 20m after 1 call. A case of proper timing to get through the pile-up! Because pile-up it was with some stations.
Next weekend the IARU HF Championships are on again. See you from OP0HQ.