Tag: ARRL DX

ARRL DX (SSB) Contest 2024

Spent a bit of time dabbling in the ARRL DX (SSB) contest this past weekend using the 10m dipole in the attic. In the process, I also discovered that the 30 or so meters of coax running from the shack to the outside, coiled up and hanging on the side of the house, also receives on 10m although not very well.

I was tuning around the band, hearing a few intelligible but faint signals, when I realized I had the radio on the wrong antenna input. When I switched over to the antenna input the 10m attic dipole was connected to, everything got much much louder.

I was hearing lots of DX activity on the band over the weekend. Most of my contacts ended up being on Sunday morning when I managed to work a few EU stations. Tuning around the band and working a few stations in between doing other things got me a total of 14 QSOs.

Not bad for a couple pieces of wire hanging from the rafters. Now I know the dipole works reasonably well.

Contest: ARRLDXSSB
 Band     QSOs     Pts  Cty  Pt/Q
    28      14      42   14   3.0
 Total      14      42   14   3.0
Score: 588
1 Mult = 1.0 Q's

ARRL DX 2014

This weekend was the ARRL DX contest. Spent a couple afternoons playing on the radio and managed 103 contacts and 47 countries. 10m was doing so well I decided to stay there for the entire contest.

According to N1MM Logger, my stats looked like

 Band    QSOs    Pts  Cty
    28     103     309   47
Score: 14,523

Managed to work a couple of stations in Hawaii and Alaska, something I don’t hear too often here with the antenna. Also heard a station in Guam (KH2L), but he was pretty faint and had quite the pileup going that I wasn’t able to break into.

Highlights included:

  • Working a couple of stations in HI and AK
  • Hearing Guam (KH2L)!
  • Hearing Japan (JA7)!

Decided to call it quits about an hour before the contest ended because i got tired of sitting, and was getting hungry. Log submitted as single op, low power, single band (10m) entry.

Need to get that 10m Moxon up in the air…

DXing

Spent some time playing on the radio during the ARRL DX contest over the weekend and added about 40 more contacts to the log. Spent most of my time working on 10m where there seemed to be a lot of good propagation today. Lots of DX stations, not a lot of noise like I usually hear. 10m is an interesting band where I heard the DX stations pretty clearly, but didn’t hear any of the stations they were working, aside from maybe a few out on the west coast.

Early in the day when I started, most of the stations I was hearing were across the Atlantic. I think the farthest stations I worked were US5D in the Ukraine and LZ9W in Bulgaria. Later on in the afternoon and evening there were a lot of Carribean and South American contacts although some of the louder (1kW) European stations could still be heard. I even managed to work a Venezuelan station who said he was operating 5W QRP (YW2LV). Pretty impressive.

Had fun with the DX contest. Maybe next time I’ll try to get some more contacts logged.