F6KAR - WAEDC CW 2006

WAE DX Contest, CW
Ops: F5VIH/SV3SJ, F6IFY, F6IRF
Station: F6KAR
Class: M/S HP
QTH: JN36AF

Band QSOs QTCs Mults
-------------------------
80: 86 2 21
40: 381 367 56
20: 390 714 64
15: 175 218 39
10: 52 24 19
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Total: 1084 1325 496
Total Score = 1,194,864

High bands station:IC756 + Ten-tec Titan - Low bands station:IC756pro3 + Ten-Tec Titan
Ants: 80m: shunt-fed tower and sloper -40m: 40-2CD - 20-15-10: KT34 and 3el ECO - RX ants: Unterminated 100m beverages NE/SW and NW/SE, K9AY loop
Software: WIn-Test
The Weather has been extremely bad all weekend, with frequent showers and lowtemperatures (almost a CQWW-CW weather !)
With the Jura (8deg toward west horizon), our KT34 and a low 3el trap-yagi, wecould not expect to be really competitive on high bands, and this was confirmedby the difficulties we experienced in several pile-ups.
On low bands, it seems that we had a good signal but the WX strongly affected our receiving performances, especially on 80m.
Anyway, those details apart it has been a great weekend, without major technical problem, and we are more than happy with the score.
The conditions: Surprising! Based on the few days before, we did not expect 15mto open toward states, not to mention 10m. The strong multiple hops E's, really helped, resulting in 31 five-banders, 5 U.S call-areas on 10m and 7 on 15m.
The traffic: On a total of 44 DXCC entities worked, more than 2/3 of the QSO'swere achieved with NA. A few "interesting" entities were there. Just to mentiona few: 3W, 4K, 9K, 9M, 9V, A6, CN, FP, HP, VP9, P4, V31, VP8/h, VQ9...
The activity: Obviously being on the Eu-side and working only DX stations can't generate high hourly rates when you are at the bottom of the solar activity. Maybe the rules are still not yet understood, or is it the fact that north hemisphere summer does not stimulate HF contesters but getting new stations to work became quite a challenge on Sunday - we counted as much as 46mn between 2 consecutive QSO's... fortunately the QTC's were there ! On the other hand, it was not too hard to find a clean frequency...
The QTC's: The world may also be divided in 2 by the ones who deal with QTC'sand the ones who don't !!! (revised version of the famous Clint Eastwood sentence, in a Sergio Leone movie!) OK I understand the casual participant only responding to CQ's, but it is quite surprising to hear stations calling CQ-WAE, and refusing to send QTC's, even when the rate gets very low... Not to mention the "?" (meaning : what are you talking about ?) when you ask for QTC's ! A bit like running a KW in a QRP-contest !
Apologies to the stations we annoyed with repeated "QTC?", but for a EU competitor, the spontaneous offers are so rare, that there is no alternative strategy to aggressive search...
It has been a great pleasure for me for me to join the CERN RC(*) team - my first multi-op for quite some time -
Thanks to all for the QSO's and QTC's andto the DARC for organizing this nice event...
(*)CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the world's largest particle physics center. http://f6kar.web.cern.ch/f6kar/