Tuesday, December 31, 2024

WQ6X Wangles yet another Weird RAC Winter Contest Weekend


The last weekend in December is always a sleepy, mixed-mode mixed-up affair. 
The goal for this weekend was two-fold:
  1. Run the Canadian RAC Winter Contest ([CLICK HERE]) mixed-mode QRP
    from Ramona to accomplish an overall high score running QRP power.
  2. Run the Stew Perry (SP-160) contest ([CLICK HERE]) QRP from WA6TQT's
    QTH in Anza, coaxing the crippled 160-meter tri-Square to the best "direction"
    for each station worked.
Thanks to a 00:00z starting time, the RAC winter contest was begun using the K3/0-mini from the desk at my office, until 04:35z.   Later, the set up was moved to Concord to finish the contest (dealing with the usual Concord internet pulse-hiccupping.  By midnight, most of North America was sleeping so I joined them, starting back up on 40-Cw around 14:45z to work Japan.  When no more JAs were heard, the move was made to 20-meters as the sun came up, enabling communication with stations eastward from Anza.


Amazingly, 15 & 10 meters didn't open up in Ramona until after 17:00z.  Resuming at 18:45z, throughout the morning and early afternoon CQ calls were made on each of the high bands giving
me RBN (Reverse Beacon Network) stats on my QRP signal.  The 3-el Stepp-IR was rotated and switched from the NORM state to 180-DEGREES and Bi-Directional.  When it was all over, I quickly made screen captures of all the relevant stats and produced a Cabrillo file - all for submission later.


With the screen now cleared, attempts to connect to STN-1 and STN-2 at the Anza QTH failed - it would seem the internet in Anza suffered a power failure with no one onsite to restart it.  With the internet confirmed down, the backup plan was to run WQ6X as a Low Power (LP) station using the 8JK mish-mash Cobra sloper array setup @W7AYT's QTH. The MFJ 993b Intellituner managed to bring the SWR down to 1.4:1, enabling 6-QSOs (14-points) made it to the log. 
Calling "CQ SP TesT" produced one RBN SPoT from K2PO/7 in Oregon.

By midnight, no QSOs outside of CA were happening (e.g. hearable), so I shut things down,
eventually submitting a 14-point LoG to say "I WuZ THERE!"


When it was all over, it would seem that WQ6X DiD indeed take a 1st-place outside of Canada.

DiD YOU work the RAC Winter or Stew Perry SP-160 contests?

Is WQ6X in YOUR LoG?

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