RBCC Team WX8S participated this year in the CQWW DX SSB contest as a group effort operation from Southern Warren County under the Explorer category delegated for equipment experimentation and new techniques, such as refining our remote base system.
Since Ohio / CQ Zone 4 is not a rare DX by any means, there was no point in running on a frequency calling CQ. Therefore, this event for us is not necessarily about total score but instead about total number of DX entity countries worked and CQ zones for multipliers in a hunt and pounce fashion.
Overall, over 300 contacts were made with 97 separate DX entities and 29 out of 40 CQ zones worked for a score well over 200,000 points.
Equipment used:
• The group’s two Semi-Portable Remote Base HF radio setup both setup at Location Alpha.
• BuddiHex antenna
• Vertical phased array antennas
• Bandpass filters
• N3FJP for logging
Some general operating notes:
• Heard HZ1HZ – First and only active YL in Saudi Arabia! Tried really hard to work her station but was not able to bust through the pile-up.
• Working Uzbekistan on SSB was a surprise. We heard some of the other “stans” but they were too weak.
• Working some of the east Africa / Indian ocean stations on SSB was an unexpected boost to our worked zones.
• As usual, Asia/East Pacific was the hardest to reach from Ohio. We could hear some but were buried in the noise or when signals were up must have just parked their auto-keyers calling CQ on the frequency while not sitting there to operate.
• As usual, Europe was the bread and butter for overall points with Caribbean / South America coming in second.
• Propagation to Australia / New Zealand was weaker than typical but we got one in the log.
The addition of the hex beam antenna for this contest was a game-changer. We were able to hear a lot of far away and unique stations—most of the unique ones had such large pile ups that we were unable to break through the noise, but the stations that did not have pile ups proved to be pretty easy to get. We would take note of the rare stations with huge pileups and go back to work them after the cluster had died down.
How We Could Improve:
- When we have more time, still need to rig up headset and foot pedal PTT adapters.
- Coordinating formal shifts to put people on the air longer in order to get more contacts.
- Setting a more rigid and formal schedule for when to change bands / antenna direction depending on where the sun and gray line propagation is shifting to work hard to reach DX entities when the best window is present.
Overall we were very pleased with how things went and look forward to the upcoming CW version.
Remote Base Contest Club 