This weekend was the running of the Worked All Germany contests or WAG. This contest supports both CW and SSB within the same contest. As for me, it was strictly CW....go figure eh!. As happens now and then just before the contest there was an atmospheric burp and the K index moved to 5! The good thing about this is everyone is affected so your still kinda on the same playing field more or less.
This is a 24-hour contest that starts at noon Saturday my time. With the poor solar conditions, there was lots of fading in and out (QSB). This resulted in lots of repeats and contacts that started at S7 and ended somewhere in the dust. I take this as an opportunity to sharpen my CW skills and learn more about the Icom 7610 filtering. This time around I took advantage of the two independent receivers the 7610 has. I had a split screen of the band I was on and the next band that could in time show some excitement. This came in very handy today when I noticed 10 meters coming to life. I swapped out 15m for 10m as it seemed to just jump to life. I had 51 contacts in just 1.5 hours and that was during so-so band conditions. I entered the contest as single operator/all band / low power (100 watts). It was a very rainy weekend here so that made it very easy to stay in the radio chair and plug along.
2 comments:
Well done Mike. I really envy your CW skills. Already noticed there was a contest going on so I stayed mostly in the WARC bands. I will be contesting next weekend in the CQWW SSB. I guess you will not participate. 73, Bas
Good morning Bas, the CW thing was something I put my mind to and I am very stubborn and wanted to master the CW contesting thing. I am still not there yet so the challenge lives on. As for the SSB contest it's not that I dislike SSB but it's just not my thing in ham radio. Many other do like it and it keeps the bands alive and that is great.
73 and have a good week,
Mike
VE9KK
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