CQWW SSB 2021 – The 11 Months Cycle
Talk aobout getting lucky with the sun! CQWW CW in 2020 was fun due to the first bigger solar flux peak in quite some time. Now, 11 months later another peak with almost the same magnitude strikes right on cue for CQWW SSB. An this spike really provided some high band action. Come on, read my notes about CQWW SSB now!
Finally good conditions on bands with a nice burst of NA on 10 meter! I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard the first NA station coming through on 10 meters Sunday afternoon. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to go all-in this weekend, I had promised my daughter we would go all in on Halloween which happened to coincide with the contest weekend. I spent a little time mostly on S&P on Saturday to get a feel for band conditions, but got hooked by the action on Sunday.
The contest was worked via remote from my city apartment. A crucial feature lacking from the Expert SDR2 remote client is the ability to switch between TX and RX antenna. It is a planned feature of the new ExpertSDR3, but for now I had to do without my RX antennas. I could have used the full ExpertSDR2 application via AnyDesk, but I opted for the overall better experience with the remote client running on my local desktop.
Another challenge with the remote client is that it can’t accept voice keying audio parallel to the Mic audio. I finally got this issue solved using a combination of DXLog’s internal voice keyer and VAC application (Virtual Audio Cables) by Eugene Muzychenko. The solution was to use VAC’s “Audio Repeater” to send the USB ModMic audio to the same virtual audio cable that DXLog sends it’s voice keyer audio to. This cable is in the other end connected to ExpertSDR’s TX audio input.
Doing a part time effort I wasn’t hoping to rank high this year, but considering this minimal effort a #2 Sweden aint bad. I do have congratulate SE5E who finished with three times my final number of contacts and four times the score, nice done Ingo (SM0AJV).
73 de SM0MDG!