Let me tell you why living in an RF quiet environment and using vertical antennas sucks big during the big contests. When you hear everyone, you cannot hear anyone. The bands are just endless heterodynes. To say I found the CQWW contest frustrating this weekend was an understatement. Hitting the bands during the prime time here and tuning up and down was an exercise in futility. Pretty much what was happening was that after identifying a signal and tuning to it, by the time I got close to being in tune, another greater heterodyne swamped out the signal I was hearing and I ended up in a tug of war between the two of them.
This was not so much a problem when conditions were a little quieter, and stations were spread out a bit, like greater than 1500hz between stations so that focusing on the one signal was much easier, but when there was a station every 500hz or so because i am an idiot who thinks working his 3 band dxcc on vertical antennas is a great idea, it was very impossible to tune to one signal only unless they were a few S points stronger than all the heterodynes combined.
Now i was not going for a score, I was just looking for new countries or phone slots with no intention of entering a log. So I never did make a lot of contacts, but managed to work Cambodia for a slot on 15, Antigua and Barbuda as well as Bonaire Island both for ATNO on 20m. All 3 were early in the morning here, during the quite time, not during the afternoon prime time and even then.
All in all I can’t complain, but I tell you what, god I need to get a beam up so that I can null out a great part of the world so that I can hear at least some place clearly. I have the bits here to get a 2 elephants yogi on 20, 15 and 10m, but really want to get 3 band dxcc first, I am 85 confirmed on 40m out of 106 worked, with about 10 that should confirm on lotw. So i don’t need many more, i just need to get up early in the morning to work some more easy ones in the EU. I just need to shit the bed a few times and stay up when i go for a 3am piss.
In other great news, boards and parts should arrive later this week and then I can get to building the new thing 🙂 Oh and a new monitor is on its way also, turns out the noise issues I have been having on 10m is all due to the psu in my monitor. Nothing is ever simple HAHAHA




