This past weekend was the ARRL International DX SSB contest. See my earlier report on the ARRL DX CW contest. The contest is between US/Canadian stations and non-US/Canadian stations (DX) with the exception of Alaska and Hawaii which are considered to be DX locations. I am a bit surprised there weren’t more stations from Mexico on.  They count as DX stations

With my modest 100w and G5RV wire antenna I was able to make 209 contacts with 155 different stations/operators. Those contacts covered 78 different DXCC entities in 19 different zones (out of 40 zones).  To show how relatively small the contesting community is, of those 155 stations I logged a QSO with, 75 of those call signs I had previously logged at least 1 QSO with, so that is almost half of the stations.

As best as I can tell, I only logged one new DXCC and that was Guinea-Bissau and the station was J5UAP. I did log a bunch of stations I don’t have any QSL confirmation on so I’m hopeful that via LoTW or a paper QSL I can get some more confirmed  I already show one of the Alaska contacts as confirmed which is good since it’s my first phone contact confirmed this year with Alaska which will help for the Triple Play Award.

The highlight for me was a large pileup late in the day on Sunday and a strong VK station in Australia was booming in. VK7ZE was clear and louder then I’ve ever heard a VK station and there was quite the pileup. It didn’t take very long and he came back with my call. How my 100w and wire made it through all the stations calling I’ll never know. Lucky is better then good. So I logged my first Australia phone contact. It shows VK7ZE as a LoTW user but I’m sending off for a paper QSL anyway!

There were 2 comments I noticed when a DX station was coming back to me, and I was silly not to note down who each was. One was an operator that came back to me with “Hey David, nice to hear you again”. Now yes, contest loggers come up with various bits of info, but regardless of it being his system which told him, it was nice that he said it.  The other comment I recall is when there was a nice pileup going for another station and he got DSL from me putting my call out and came back with “That must be K2DSL, right?”. Again, even if his software did it, it made it very personal. So though I didn’t note the specific operators, thank you!

As for working the bands, 20m was where most activity was occurring. I did my best to try and get stations (and multipliers) on 15m, but with my less then optimal setup, that’s better said then done. When 15m was open, I was able to get a long distance, but when it shut down for me, it was as if there wasn’t anyone there. A directional antenna would have definitely helped with 15m this weekend. 40m and 80m is where I was after dark, though 20m was still pretty active then too. 40m and 80m were almost 1:1 for multipliers so that definitely helps the score. Below is my score summary from N1MM. Thanks to all the operators that picked little ‘ol me up when I came a calling.

        Band    QSOs     Pts  Cty
         3.5      23      69   21
           7      33      99   29
          14     126     378   75
          21      27      81   17
       Total     209     627  142

            Score : 89,034

73,
K2DSL