This weekend was the 24 hour LZ DX contest. Everybody could work everybody but the main geographic goal for points are stations from Bulgaria. The contest is a good final run for the CQWW CW contest. It is SSB and CW, but I only participated in CW.

Recently I upgraded my Chameleon Hybrid from the Micro to the Mini. The rated power for CW for the Micro is only 25W. I used to run it at 60W, with longer pauses in-between calling while running, but nevertheless, the toroidal core heated and the SWR raised quicker than a Falcon 9! The Mini can handle 100W, so a chance for a good test-run.

I started late on Saturday and the higher bands were closing already. So I tried 40 & 80m, but with my compromised antenna and the MUF dropping really fast, conditions were tough. So after 56 QSO’s I switched off the radio, and turned on the television for some other entertainment till bedtime, speedskating in Calgary.

Sunday morning it took some time for the MUF to climb. After struggling a bit more on 40m, I followed the graph on Propquest to switch bands. The MUF made it all the way to over 30MHz, but this was a bit late for JA/HL and too early for W/PY. 10m was a bit of a disappointment. All in all there didn’t seem to be a lot of DX active, but some nice activity from KH0 and VK4 which drew a lot of crowd obviously. Nevertheless, I am happy with my test-run for the CQWW CW as often contests with a geographical focus have a low participation.