I was racking up the contacts in the recent ARRL DX Contest SSB at the Oak Bay Marina. Conditions were pretty darn good. I was pumped. Twenty-five contacts on 10m was my goal. Here’s proof that I’m not prevaricating. My Kenwood 480 transceiver can be seen just beyond my laptop.
Two local amateurs (living about 150 yards away) decided to drop by… and interrupt me. Arghhhh! These guys (Andy VE7PT and Roger VE7AP) are great friends and we had delightful face-to-face QSOs; but why weren’t they chained to their radios!? I was missing contacts in Spain, the Bahamas, Japan…. Arghhhh!!! Again!
To compound my agony, I was working one of the many Brazilian stations, this one around 28.315 MHz when my booming 50 watt signal was flattened by Jim VE7ZO up in Bowser! About 150 kms away. I couldn’t believe it.
I participated (for a total of 45 minutes) in the CQ 160 meter SSB contest on Friday and Saturday evenings. 160 is a real struggle for my short vertical and under-sized radials (probably way less than 1% antenna efficiency on 160), but I was encourage by my results in the CW version of the contest, so thought I would give it a try. SSB signals need a LOT more bandwidth (over 50 times) than CW, so the resultant increase in broadband noise at the receiving end severely limited my efforts! I could work some (but not all) signals who were a true 59+, but no one else could hear me. All my contacts were with US stations: I could hear VA7MM quite well, but he couldn’t hear me! My furthest DX was Idaho and Colorado (they must have had a low noise level there).
I posted my meager results (10 contacts, 350 points) on 3830 and gave credit to IHF. At least I wasn’t last!
73
Roger
VE7AP
https://islandhf.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/IslandHF-logo-soaring-eagle-light-blue-back-300x118.png00Roger Palmerhttps://islandhf.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/IslandHF-logo-soaring-eagle-light-blue-back-300x118.pngRoger Palmer2025-02-24 10:30:082025-02-24 10:31:04160 Meter SSB Contest
On February 15th Duane Sandmeyer VE7UF opened his contest station to Rado VA7OO, Nedo VA7AO, and Gabor VE7JH (an IslandHF member). They were on a mission. Read how they accomplished it. Congratulations to Duane and his team.
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Big thanks to VE7UF for hosting our motley crew at his superb contest station. This time almost everything worked as advertised, the biggest problem we had was an intermittent PTT cable that we fixed in 10 minutes. I wish every contest would be this glitch-free. Our goal was to set a new British Columbia (BC, or VE7-land) M/S record, by beating the current 1.8M points. For this purpose twin brothers Rade and Nedo took the 2 hour ferry ride from the Mainland to our Vancouver Island QTH. Their enthusiasm was contagious and we kept going in very good spirits with our heads and keying speed held high even rates were low and we couldn’t break a pileup. With the ongoing stormy solar conditions we were quite apprehensive at the start as the bands were very quiet at 2350. But then BOOM, at 0000 the switch was flipped on. This was our first “real” M/S effort. Took a while to fully take advantage of the 10QSY/hr rule and the bands being in quite good shape hard decisions had to be made to maximize the score. We learnt a lot about strategy, but I think we did very well and by the second day got into a very good rhythm. Having “butts in chair” ensured a steady stream of QSOs, the worst hour was 18 while coming very close but never actually breaking 100/hr due to a) our location on the world map, b) hunting mults. Conditions were surprisingly “okay” with the usual caveats that we are all very used to out here in the Pacific North West. This just means that with the exception of AS/OC we just have to wait our turns until the rest of NA station “work the mult” and that those EU openings are short and weak. Big thanks to our friends in the Land of the Rising Sun with 975 JA QSOs in the log. With 118 DXCC contacted, we had 30+ QSOs with the following, in decreasing order: JA, DL, UA3, PY, UA9, I, HA, EA, F, SP, OK, S5, G, YB, KH6, HL. Great activity from our DX friends and we hope we were able to colour the box next to “BC” on their multiplier table. We achieved our goal with flying colours and are very satisfied being able to cross the 3M point mark. 73 à tous and hope to see you in 2026!
