The 40m band was hot at 5:30am EDT. I got:
Switched up to 15m to get Finland, and I grabbed 1 local contact on 6m. I’ve accumulated 1800 contacts on QRZ, 1489 are confirmed, across 79 countries.
On the good old 12.5m EFRW, I’m trying 10m FT8 this morning. It’s going nowhere. 15m is much better.
I have ham-alert for anyone in PA, NJ, or MD spotting the Hawaii DXCC. I’ve been chasing Hawaii around over to 17m and other bands as they pop up, but I didn’t seem them much. It’s the last state I need of the 50.
10m is busy here in mid-afternoon, and I’m reaching south america on 5w. I got Suriname and Cayman Islands on 5w. then 10m maybe died again.
I just got the VP6G DXpedetion on 5w on FT8 on 28.0785MHz. That’s my first “OC”! I don’t know why they were shifted, but I saw it on the waterfall on my X6100, so checked it out.
The SSB part of the ARRL DX Contest this weekend was a phone contest contacting DX stations only. I used the X6100 running 10W and 41-foot random wire out front window from Mountville.
The exchange was:
59 <state> (PA, papa alpha)59 <tx power>My raw score
for my 42 contacts was 3 * 42 * 37 = 4662,
but I’m sure some logs may be busted,
so it’ll be less.
I qualified as low power, limited antenna.
I logged directly into QRZ.com. I could take time to understand their entire callsign and then call back.
Logs I submitted:
START-OF-LOG: 2.0
CALLSIGN: KC3WWC
CONTEST: ARRL-DX-SSB
CREATED-BY: adif2cabrillo.com version 3.0.1
QSO: 14318 PH 2024-03-02 0331 KC3WWC 59 PA VP5M 59 100 1
QSO: 14288 PH 2024-03-02 0416 KC3WWC 59 PA V3O 59 1000 1
QSO: 7227 PH 2024-03-02 0438 KC3WWC 59 PA KP4AA 59 1000 1
QSO: 7191 PH 2024-03-02 0455 KC3WWC 59 PA EI7M 59 1000 1
QSO: 7181 PH 2024-03-02 0500 KC3WWC 59 PA TM6P 59 1000 1
QSO: 14271 PH 2024-03-02 0609 KC3WWC 59 PA EW5A 59 1000 1
QSO: 14264 PH 2024-03-02 0612 KC3WWC 59 PA WP3C 59 100 1
QSO: 28379 PH 2024-03-02 1622 KC3WWC 59 PA OM0R 59 1000 1
QSO: 28396 PH 2024-03-02 1645 KC3WWC 59 PA OL8W 59 700 1
QSO: 28455 PH 2024-03-02 1707 KC3WWC 59 PA SP8R 59 1000 1
QSO: 28499 PH 2024-03-02 1726 KC3WWC 59 PA YT1X 59 1000 1
QSO: 28516 PH 2024-03-02 1728 KC3WWC 59 PA IO5O 59 500 1
QSO: 28586 PH 2024-03-02 1735 KC3WWC 59 PA TK4TH 59 500 1
QSO: 28582 PH 2024-03-02 1742 KC3WWC 59 PA E70T 59 1000 1
QSO: 28589 PH 2024-03-02 1757 KC3WWC 59 PA P40L 59 1000 1
QSO: 21280 PH 2024-03-02 1826 KC3WWC 59 PA SP8R 59 1000 1
QSO: 21294 PH 2024-03-02 1830 KC3WWC 59 PA II2S 59 500 1
QSO: 21298 PH 2024-03-02 1837 KC3WWC 59 PA EW5A 59 1000 1
QSO: 21322 PH 2024-03-02 1843 KC3WWC 59 PA II2Q 59 500 1
QSO: 21330 PH 2024-03-02 1850 KC3WWC 59 PA SN2B 59 1000 1
QSO: 28649 PH 2024-03-02 2244 KC3WWC 59 PA LT3E 59 1000 1
QSO: 21445 PH 2024-03-02 2318 KC3WWC 59 PA P40L 59 1000 1
QSO: 21420 PH 2024-03-02 2322 KC3WWC 59 PA 8P5A 59 1000 1
QSO: 21345 PH 2024-03-02 2350 KC3WWC 59 PA PJ5/SP9FIH 59 100 1
QSO: 21338 PH 2024-03-02 2352 KC3WWC 59 PA ED8W 59 1000 1
QSO: 21290 PH 2024-03-02 2357 KC3WWC 59 PA ZF1A 59 1000 1
QSO: 14237 PH 2024-03-03 0013 KC3WWC 59 PA TM6M 59 1000 1
QSO: 14247 PH 2024-03-03 0020 KC3WWC 59 PA 9A1A 59 1000 1
QSO: 14258 PH 2024-03-03 0022 KC3WWC 59 PA IO6T 59 500 1
QSO: 14258 PH 2024-03-03 0025 KC3WWC 59 PA TI1T 59 1000 1
QSO: 14272 PH 2024-03-03 0028 KC3WWC 59 PA LP1H 59 1000 1
QSO: 14284 PH 2024-03-03 0035 KC3WWC 59 PA IO5O 59 500 1
QSO: 7194 PH 2024-03-03 0048 KC3WWC 59 PA SP8R 59 1000 1
QSO: 7258 PH 2024-03-03 0101 KC3WWC 59 PA J62K 59 1000 1
QSO: 7236 PH 2024-03-03 0241 KC3WWC 59 PA NP4Z 59 73 1
QSO: 14330 PH 2024-03-03 0312 KC3WWC 59 PA II2Q 59 500 1
QSO: 28308 PH 2024-03-03 1457 KC3WWC 59 PA S55OO 59 1000 1
QSO: 28327 PH 2024-03-03 1511 KC3WWC 59 PA 9A7V 59 1000 1
QSO: 28367 PH 2024-03-03 1526 KC3WWC 59 PA NP2J 59 1000 1
QSO: 28369 PH 2024-03-03 1532 KC3WWC 59 PA SJ8R 59 1000 1
QSO: 21285 PH 2024-03-03 2332 KC3WWC 59 PA HK1T 59 1000 1
QSO: 21338 PH 2024-03-03 2343 KC3WWC 59 PA T42T 59 1000 1
END-OF-LOG: 2.0
I had some problems conveying my call over phone:
I made 42 valid contacts, and 4 were outside my privileges as general. I’m not accustomed to thinking about the boundaries in the SSB portion of the bands.
For my future reference, I noted voice ranges for general:
During the contest, people were tuned all over the place and not aligned on 1 or 0.5 khz. I tried to align with them, but sometimes higher was easier to read, but does that shift my voice for them? RIT/XIT may have been the answer for longer contacts, but not for this quick stuff. A woman’s higher voice confounded me a bit as I tried to fine tune.
I had great fun yelling my callsign all weekend, and it’s the most I’ve ever used my microphone.
I assembled a new 71-ft (21.56m) EFRW and strung it up at Emily’s. It’s 5-6ft off the ground. I give it a 17-ft (5.2m) counterpoise and a 9:1 unun as usual. 2:30pm EST, 1W into it gets me midwest to a little bit of Europe on 10m. I’m not making many contacts, so I bumped up to 5W.
The antenna tunes on 40m too just fine. I’m getting a few more contacts there.
As a new strategy, I’m aiming for ALC around 1.0, instead of just below any movement. This allows me to not touch the power slider in WSJT-X quite so much.
I found the QRZ awards tab on the logbook, and applied for awards for which I’ve qualified. They now show on my profile.
I was using the horizontal dipole from the RTL-SDR v3 kit, fully-extended. I saw some good gray-line propagation into Asia.
I heard around 31m band (9700khz):
Also:
I used the fully-extended, large dipole kit and the RTL-SDR to successfully receive lots of 40m signals. It may have been especially busy, since it was Labor Day in the US and Canada. I found FT8 (40m and elsewhere) signals from St Lucia, Slovinia, South America, Cuba, and a little FT4 (40m).
I also found some BPSK31, RTTY/45, and still unidentified digital signals.