2006 CQ 160-Meter Contest, CW

Call: VP9I

Operator(s): WA4PGM

Station: VP9GE

Class: Single Op LP

QTH: Bermuda

Operating Time (hrs): 24

Summary:

Total: QSOs = 814 State/Prov = 59 Countries = 32 Total Score = 381,927

Club: Potomac Valley Radio Club

Comments:

This was the first time I've been outside the US for CQ160 and it was quite the experience to say the least. This being my 3rd trip to Bermuda I was somewhat familiar with the station setup and felt comfortable making a short trip by arriving Thursday afternoon before the contest. I had planned to install a beverage and maybe a pennant for RX antennas but the weather didn't cooperate.

Landing Thursday in Bermuda found winds up to 35 knots and getting stronger into the weekend, with rain and hail. Needless to say not ideal for antenna building, the 160m Inverted L hung from a tree was being blown around and by the looks of weather not improving I knew it make fall at any moment. Friday only found the weather worst with stronger winds and by contest time into the night 50+ knots.

The swr remained under 2:1 but at times would jump sky high and I thought I had lost the L several times. oh crap! Jump up with flashlight to inspect the L only to find it still in tree, checked feed line connections and everything seems good back to rig and swr is fine. Hmmm? Found the problem to be a short piece of coax feeding to inside the shack later on. I apologize to W7SE for not coming back after you called, I sure needed WY but the swr was sky high and had no output power. We did work later on, whew!

Before the contest the FT1000D was heating up from the fan not working and I certainly didn't want to burn it up so I changed rigs to a FT920 to discover the CW filter wasn't working. Darn! This isn't going to be fun without a filter, atmospheric noise S9 from the winds with line noise to boot. Luckily the noise blanker took most of the line noise out but still no CW filter, I tried DSP, ESP, STP, but nothing worked to help narrow the bandwidth. I tried CQing high in the band but it seems a lot of VFO's don't go above 1850, you're missing some mults people. I knew if I could get on my favorite frequency of 1801 it might help, first hour I s&p because 1801 was busy. My first contacts were with my contest homies, WK4Y, W4MYA, and K7SV, all worked QRP as I started out in that category only to change to low power from the conditions I had. I also wanted to work as many as possible if the antenna stayed up. I basically camped on 1800.5 to 1801 as much as possible, it would be impossible for me to run in the DX Window. Duh! What DX Window????? I know I heard more USA stations in the window than DX, maybe it's just me but make the window 1800-2000 that's the only way you going get people to observe a gentlemen's agreement. Besides with all the DX on the band it will never work inside 5kcs.

Worked 49 states missing MT, heard K7BG with a large pileup and never could bust it so I'll be looking for you next time to complete my WAS on Topband. 59 of 63 sections worked missing MT, NU, NWT, & YT. 32 countries, heard many more. Total comes to 381,927 points with 24 hours of operating. Thanks to everyone that got on the air and supported the 2006 CQ160CW, all the activity certainly makes for a fun weekend. See you next year!

73,

Kyle

WA4PGM