CQWW SSB 2004
GM5A MULTI-MULTI REPORT
Ops: W0GJ GM3YOR GM4AFF GM4FDM GM0CLN GM0HZI GM0NAI GM0RLZ GM0TTY MM0BSM MM0CCC MM3GVE
After a catalogue of disasters in the weeks leading up to the contest it was a miracle that we were ready at all for the start. Two broken rotators, a 4ele 20m monobander which decided it would try to tunnel to Australia, nose first (ouch), and total mains power failure on the site one week prior to the event were just the highlights of an illustrious list! Another working (well almost!) rotator was eventually installed on the Thursday before the start, a 2 element quad replaced the 4 ele monobander and we eventually had mains power returned two days before the contest!
A huge vote of thanks is due to those who helped rectify the problems but in particular to Stu MM0BSM, Colin GM0RLZ and Neil GM0HZI who worked wonders and put in some very long hours to sort it all out.
As for the contest... sadly we added to our list of problems when we encountered MAJOR problems on the first night with our 80m station. Suffices to say that in the first 12 hours we only had 81 QSOs on that band, causing several sense of humour bypasses amongst the team, and one set of welded relay contacts in an amp! As a cure (but not a great one) we erected a sloping dipole and installed a standby amplifier on Saturday. This was used until the end.
In addition the computer network was not at all stable and had to be regularly re-booted in order to keep the data flowing between stations. It appears that this may have been at least partly due to a bug in the Writelog software we used but we also suspect that some RF was getting into the network. Plenty of work to do before CQWW CW then!
Now that all the bad bits are out of the way I must say that we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. We had great team spirit and a big enough team to ensure that everyone managed to sleep for a while. We were also pleased to welcome Glenn Johnson W0GJ who joined us from Minnesota for the weekend. Glenn was a valuable addition to team and we would all like to thank him for his help. It was pleasing to see that, after all his work running amateur radio exams and setting up a ham club in Bhutan, Glenn was on the mic for our two QSOs with that country. Conditions on the bands were great for this point in the solar cycle.
We had set a target of 10 million points before the contest and easily managed to surpass it. I'll let the band breakdown explain the rest.
Provisional Points Breakdown:
BAND QSO ZN DX 160M 739 10 60 80M 795 15 65 40M 1719 29 110 20M 2316 37 138 15M 2152 38 143 10M 894 32 140 TOTAL 8615 161 656 SCORE 12,747,651
Regards
Colin Smith (GM0CLN)
On Behalf Of The GMDX Group Contest Team
