Svalbard QSL
The Svalbard Topband Activity QSL has been designed and will be printed next week. Click the QSL icon to the right for a peak at the artwork.
QSL requests have been coming in since the day we arrived back home from Svalbard and we are looking forward to start replying to the requests. If you want to confirm your log status, please check our log search for this activity. QSL should be sent to the home call of the operator via buro or direct.
What a fun contest weekend! I was really looking forward to the CQWW 160 CW contest as topband is my favorite band, and what a great fun weekend it became. I entered the contest in category A single operator high power, but was initially tempted to re-enter in assisted mode and use the cluster as the band was quickly saturated with strong EU QRM making it hard to S&P for DX. I decided to stay blind and use my own skills combined with the powerful filtering in the K3 to pull calls out from an ocean of clix and QRM.
Topband was in excellent shape and the band was open all through daylight Saturday and Sunday with strong signals from states like TX, OR, CO, MT and a few exotic places like XE. The boys from K7RAT was fading in and out all day long peaking at 579, but I was not able to break through their contest QRM – I need a bigger stick! Just 30 minutes before noon (3 hrs 21 min after SR) I logged KL7RA who where booming, see audio link below.
During the total operating time of 22:49 hours I logged 925 unique calls in 56 different DXCCs, 30 states and provinces. My goal was to beat the results of the best SM station last year in my category, and with my final (claimed) score of 448.576 point I did it with almost 4.000 points of margin… well, lets see how many busted calls are in there.
On a techie note I experimented with a very simple diversity antenna setup, using pennants in NE and NW as main RX antennas and a 20 ft coax loop placed around 35-40 meters from the pennants. The result was better than I expected and diversity reception really helped pulling out the weaker ones. A side effect was that I could listen into several directions at the same time, and based on left or right audio to better be able to guess the direction of a calling station and chose the appropriate RX antenna.
To sum it up, the CQWW 160 CW contest provided lots of fun for the weekend and the goal of the contest was achieved – now I just need some sleep to catch up. Thanks to you all!
73 de Björn, SE0X (SM0MDG)
SM0MDG QSL
Today a box with 2000 of the new QSL cards arrived at the doorstep. This card will be used to confirm contacts for SM0MDG, SE0X and 7S0X.
Pse direct your QSL requests via buro or direct to SM0MDG, information in QRZ.com is up to date.
73 de Björn
SMØMDG Björn and OZ1LXJ John were active from the JW5E club station in Longyearbyen, Svalbard. A total of 1.011 QSO’s were logged.
QSL route is via homecalls, buro or direct. If you worked us both and prefer to send direct, it is enough to send to one of us.
Log check at sm0mdg.com/jw.
Our TNX to everyone of you who worked us, tried to work us, or just listened. A special TNX to JW5NM Mathias for your help and hospitality!
73 de John JW/OZ1LXJ & Björn JW/SM0MDG
I will participate as SEØX in CQWW 160 January 23 – 25, 2009. Entry will be in category A – single operator, high power.
73 de Björn, SM0MDG (SE0X)
Below is the claimed score of SEØX in CQWW CW, but first a proper contest meal 🙂
SEØX contest meal
Claimed score:
73 de Björn
I got many requests about how I put together my 18 meter topband vertical so here is the recepie:
SM0MDG 160m toploaded vertical
The base of this antenna project is the 18 meter spiderbeam mast using three levels of guying where the upper guys also serve as the top hat. This makes it easy to deploy the antenna for temporary use but the antenna is also robust enough to survive the top band season.
As the top part of the glass-fibre pole is weak, the hat has to be attached two sections down from the top, at around 15 meters height. I am using three 15 meter long 1 mm enamelled copper wire for my hat. That is enough for full legal power, and the wires are strong enough for guying.
The vertical antenna wire is 1.5 mm insulated multi cord running from top to bottom. I use a very simple ground system of two elevated radials which works fine in my location but you might want to consider a lager number of radials on ground. The antenna measures around 17 Ohms so I feed it with using an un-un of this type wound on dual FT240-61 cores. In addition to this I have a common mode choke of RG-213 wound 18-20 turns on a 10 cm plastic pipe to suppress RF in the coax shield.
You will find a PDF document with the drawing here.
73 de Björn, SM0MDG