QRP Record Hunting in CQ-160 CW

Shame on me! I haven’t updated the blog in a while, so here we go. I have several soap box notes prepared from the major contests this season. Lets start with CQ-160 CW.

The goal in CQ160 CW this year was to break the SM record in the QRP class. I also wanted to work at least a few states which I figured should be doable if propagation was decent. Unfortunately it wasn’t, propagation was not good enough and only marginal signals came across from NA. But for breaking the record it didn’t matter much as there was plenty of EU stations around to support the effort.

The record broke already before 6:30 on Saturday morning, at 19:00 my own score goal was achieved. At this point I decided to adjust the goal for the weekend to 500 contacts.

I did work a few AF and AS DX multipliers; 4X, 5B, CT3, EA8, HZ, UA9 and UN. Topband was not broken, it wasn’t just supportive enough to let 5 watt make the trip to NA.

Because of the weather I couldn’t reach the station so the contest was operated remote using the K3-K3/0 combo. Transmit antenna is the newly installed Axtorp linear loaded vertical from Lannabo Antennas over my experimental floating ground rods. I’ll have more on this new antenna and the floating ground rods in an upcoming post.

I am happy with the results. The choice of entering in the QRP category was the right one, trying to top my previous efforts in a High Power category had been just frustrating with the weak band conditions.

When the finish line was passed I had more than 500 contacts logged. Some of these where dupes, and the number of contacts added up at 487 uniques. The total numbers of multipliers collected was 47. Final claimed score 115103.

Coolest call in the log? Definitely Z66X!

Thanks to all 487 stations logged, 73 de SM0MDG/SE0X!