Tag: 10m

CQ WPX (SSB) 2024

I started to play a little bit in the CQ WPX (SSB) contest this past weekend (March 30-31 2024) using the 10m antenna in the attic over the garage. There was a decent amount of activity on the band, mostly from the Caribbean and South America, with a smattering of European stations.

I had logged 6 contacts when I learned that I was making the light on the garage door opener turn on and off.

I’ll have to find some ferrites to put on the wires going into the garage door opener to see if that helps.

Contest: CQWPXSSB
 Band     QSOs     Pts  WPX  Pt/Q
    28       6      16    6   2.7
 Total       6      16    6   2.7
Score: 96
1 Mult = 1.0 Q's

6m/10m attic dipole

Joining the 2m ground plane antenna in the attic now is a 6m/10m fan dipole.

There are too many rafters and roof supports above the ceiling to easily get a longer antenna into the attic, but a 10m dipole is short enough to get up there with some reasonable effort. I decided might as well make it a fan and add 6m to it as well.

Getting the antenna installed in the attic and connected up turned out to be a process that spanned a few weeks, but yesterday I finally got it connected up to the antenna analyzer (RigExpert Stick 230) and got everything trimmed up to about as good as it was going to get.

SWR screen grab from the RigExpert 230 for the 6m band
SWR screen grab from the RigExpert 230 for the 6m band
6m/10m fan dipole SWR across the 6m band
6m/10m fan dipole SWR across the 6m band
SWR screen grab from the RigExpert 230 for the 10m band
SWR screen grab from the RigExpert 230 for the 10m band
6m/10m fan dipole SWR across the 10m band
6m/10m fan dipole SWR across the 10m band
SWR plots from the RigExpert Stick 230 acquired using the Antscope Android app.

The SWR is under 3 for most of the 6m band dipping down to just above 2 around 51 MHz. For the 10m band, the SWR is under 2.6 across the band and dipping down to just above 2.2 at about 28.8 MHz.

The radio’s internal antenna tuner seems to handle the antenna pretty well. Now to see if I can make any contacts with it…