Category: Contesting

Gareth (G0MFR), John (G0KFM), John (G4POF), Tony (G3PFM) and Dave (G0FVH) gathered at the club over the weekend 9-10 December for the ARRL 10 m ARRL contest! Good to see the HF shack busy over the weekend. Pork pies were consumed and much DX was worked!

The band switched on at sunrise with early openings to Asiatic Russia and northern China. The JA and ZL paths never opened this far north (I tried). The VK path soon opened and John (G4POF) worked several stations on SSB in the morning with real S9 signals. We picked up some nice south east / mid Asia multipliers during the morning.

The north / south path was open during the day with South Africa & Kenya on CW and Namibia & St Helena on SSB. Working European multipliers was very difficult apart from some very unreliable backscatter propagation. Even the big stations in north Africa were difficult, with the skip going over their heads.

About mid-day the South America path was hammering in. Dave (G0FVH) worked several Argentinian stations that were absolutely end stopping.

Very good opening into southern Caribbean on the second day (much stronger than on the first day): Aruba, Curacao, French Guyana, Trinidad, etc, etc all 1st call S9++.

After lunch the band was completely open to the US with stations to work every few hundred Hz from 28.000 to 28.120 on CW and similar on SSB starting about 28.280.

The real polar paths into KH6, KL7, etc didn’t really happen but in general 28 MHz was absolutely hopping and it was a fun contest. It was good to see that G4R has been well used in the last few months.

_{Article by Gareth G0MFR, 16 December 2023.}

Over the weekend of 25th/26th Nov FRARS entered the CQ World Wide CW contest. This is a 48 hour CW contest with the aim of making as many contacts as possible. Every DXCC country and CQ zone is a multiplier to boost the score.

We started at 00:00z Our first contact was Romeo YO4RDW. We worked each other on 5 bands over the weekend. Conditions were very good especially on the higher bands. A total of 127 DXCC countries were worked including over 100 on 28MHz and 21MHz.

We made over 1400 QSOs with a score of over 1.5 million which put us top England station in the multi operator/single TX category. Romeo was top single operator in Romania and very high in the Europe rankings.

A great result for club members and FRARS. The rotator is now fixed and we have some ideas for LF antennas so hopefully we’ll do better next year.

_{Article by Gareth G0MFR}

Over the weekend of 28th & 29th of October five members of FRARS formed a team to operate the CQ WW SSB contest from our HF shack at the club.

This was a Mutli Op All Band QRO effort and we used a beam antenna for the upper bands as well as a top band windom and a vertical for the lower bands.

The callsign used was G4R, this is a short contest call issued to us by the RSGB which allows for shorter exchanges and less chance of mistakes.

Quite a bit of preparation went into the event with team members wiring up footswitches, checking headsets, checking over our computer rig control & logging and generally checking out the rig, amp and antennas.

Several of us were new to SSB contesting but we soon got into it with good runs on all bands. Conditions on Saturday were particularly good and the bands were still open on Sunday with big US pile ups especially on 15 m.

We ended up with a raw score of over 850,000 which gave us 4th in our category in the UK which we were pleased with.

We’ll be back next year with lots of lessons learned and improved antennas.

Team members: 2E0NEP G0MFR G4CVX M0ODE M0RHS

The CQ DX WW web page can be found here.

_{Article by Gareth G0MFR, 6/11/2023.}

As usual YO DX HF is one of the favourite contests for club member Romeo YO4RDW! It was great to make some 67 QSOs on 10 m and get them in the log. A total of 1204 QSOs were achieved.

The graphs show the QSO rate and the distribution of activity across the bands.

Conditions were not great, with 80 m and 40 m very noisy. Also, the rate dropped during the night and Romeo had time for pork pies and coffee!

The goal was to win the contest and that goal was achieved!

It was a great time and a lot of fun.

_{Article by Romeo YO4RDW, 31/10/2023.}