WPX SSB 2001 KL9A @ W4AN


I was in Georgia for spring break, and Bill W4AN was nice enough to let me operate from his awesome station in the mountains of northern Georgia. This was my first contest outside of the west coast, and it was an incredible learning experience. I am more of a CW op than an SSB op, so I wasn't looking for an outstanding score, especially for my first time on the east coast. Before the contest I tried to do as much research as I could. I asked top scorers for their logs and rate sheets, and broke them down and analyzed until I was blue in the face. Several people also gave me some great tips on band choices and offtimes. If conditions were good, I thought, I could get 3500 q's and 1000 mults. That would be good enough for top 5 or so. My whole plan revolved on conditions being really good. In the weeks prior to the contest they were probably the best I have ever heard. This being my first cycle, that probably isn't saying a whole lot, but it was ok with me. After taking every factor into consideration that I could think of, I made up a spreadsheet of where I should be each hour and when the best times to take off were. This turned out to be both good and bad. It didn't even cross my mind that my plan would fall apart if conditions were bad. I knew that contesting from W4 is about as different from KL7 as you can get without leaving the continent.

About two days before the contest I started to get a little bit sick. No big deal I thought, I've contested sick many times. With the mandatory 12 hours off in WPX, it would be a breeze. I was ready to go. I had my spreadsheet of my game plan, my beam heading map, my laptop with Geoclock and audio recording software, 12 pack of SURGE, 2 packages of trail mix, and my friend Terri made me some sandwiches to hold me over. I was ready to go do some damage. I did not check the propagation forecast for the weekend. It was about a 3 hour drive to the station, and we met Bill there in the afternoon. That gave me plenty of time to learn things and possibly get some rest. The first thing I heard from W4 was a J28 on 10 meters... and he was LOUD. That's probably no big deal from W4, but from KL7 that is awfully rare. I was pumped... this was going to be a very very fun contest and a great way to finish off my spring break, even if it was SSB. There was no way I was going to sleep before the contest, I so I decided to work some stations. 15m was open to JA, so I started to CQ. Basically, working JA's from W4 is painful. It's probably better than W1, but compared to KL7 or W7 it's horrible. There were some that were s9 or maybe even 10 over 9, but most were s5 or so. I'm sure the s5 stations would be s9 in Alaska. It wasn't that bad though, Bill's station is huge, and I felt pretty loud. On the other hand, Europe, Africa, and South America were blowing my mind. Conditions were great, and I was debating what band to start on.

I decided it was best to stick to the plan andstart on 15 meters to JA. I didn't have SO2R in this contest, but it really didn't matter because I had never done SO2R before. Mistake number 1 happened at 0041z when I moved from 15m to 20m. I worked 57 stations in the first 40 minutes on 15, and that seemed slow to me. They were almost all 3 pointers, with a few states mixed in. I went to 20m and tried to run EU, but I should have stayed on 15m for probably another 30 minutes. It wasn't a huge mistake, but a lot of little mistakes add up real quick. The 2nd hour was better, with 196 stations worked by 0200z. 20 meters is crowded anywhere, but I had NEVER seen it this bad before. It was insane... and SSB is bad enough, but on a crowded 20m it's enough to make your head hurt. :) Mistake number 2 happened at 0231z when I moved from 20 to 40 WAY too early to try and work some 6 pointers. Bill told me that his station plays very well on 40m, which it does. Not once did I have to wait in a pileup, and the band was PACKED. CQing was working a little bit, I was getting answers at about 40 an hour. This was the same as 80/hr on 20m, so I thought it was OK That quickly dried up and I was hanging. I went to 80m real quick just to see what it was like and worked a lot of stateside real quick, and then back to 40. After wasting enough time on 40m, I went back to 20m where I should have been all the time. The rate was pretty decent on 20m, but 40m kept calling me. I wanted at least 200 Q's on 40m. I was getting answers, but it was painfully slow. Everyone said I was loud and had a clear frequency, so I guess stations just weren't there or I was doing something wrong. Having never CQ'd above 7150 for DX, this was new to me. I kept bouncing between 20, 40, and 80 all night.

My first offtime was from 0600z 1000z roughly. I should have taken off from about 0500z 1100z or maybe even longer. Had I read the propagation forecast the day before, I would know that a huge flare and CME just hit and the bands were going to take a nose dive. To me, the bands sounded great to EU. 20m wasn't especially good, but 15m was amazing. It was solid from 21200 21450 and finding a place to CQ was hard. I didn't hear KQ2M on, and that kind of bothered me. He seems to be Mr. WPX SSB, and being on the same band as him probably wasn't a bad idea. After running 15m for a while I thought 10m HAD to be open well and rates were going to be huge. After all, I had 8/8 on top of a mountain. The rate was pretty good, I could deal with 120/hr. I was surprised how weak many of the eastern Europe stations were. Isn't Europe supposed to be loud on 10m from W4AN? Something was wrong. All day Saturday I kept trying to run 10m because the rate there HAD to be better than 15m. It would have been... had the sun not exploded. :) So I stupidly kept trying to run 10m instead of 15m where almost all of my competitors were. It didn't even register that maybe they knew something I didn't. But to me, the rate on 10m to EU was much better than anything I've seen from KL7 on a regular basis. I probably lost 200 qso's right there while trying to run 10 meters all day. Things got slow, and I tried to run JA on 15. They were pretty loud, so I tried 10m. This was a great move, and the rate was excellent. Huge mistake number 4 (1 3: not looking at a prop forecast, 40m, 10m) was moving off of 10m and going to 20m to try to work Europe. After blowing tons of valuable time on 20m, I went back up to 15 and wasted more time. Then I went to 20 for another huge waste of time. Later on I found out that I was the only one not on 10m running JA's in an unusual opening. I also found out that I missed the huge 15m JA opening while I was working guys at 70/hr on 20m, and my competition was working over 100/hr to JA. I believe that if I had another radio to listen on, I would have known about a few of these openings. But I had never done SO2R before, so everything seemed normal to me... how was I to know that 15 was open? It shouldn't be open this time of day from W4 should it?

The rest of the contest kept going downhill from there. I made one bad decision after another. On Saturday night I was trying to get something going on 20m to EU, because 40m was just not happening... nobody was answering me, but I was still getting 59+++ reports. I heard KQ2M on 20m at 0538z working Europe. I was at number 2223, and he was at 1994. At first I thought this was good... then it hit me. I was doing something seriously wrong. WT6V was way ahead of me all the time... I thought it was a multi op from W6. Oops. All of my competition was ahead of me except KQ2M. I figured that he HAD to be going serious in this contest, and he obviously new something I didn't. For a while I was working just as many guys as he was, and we were going qso for qso. The band took a dive and I was ready for some sleep. This flu or whatever it was was catching up to me, and I was coughing pretty bad. I scanned the band one more time, and found NF4A. I don't know what this station has for antennas or a location, but I wouldn't touch it. I felt LOUD on 20 meters, and I heard a few W's cqing with maybe a handful of the EU big guns on the whole band. But NF4A was blowing my mind. I checked to make sure I was on the EU antenna, attenuator, everything I could think of. They must have had a pileup of EU and JA both. Not only were they running huge rate, but I couldn't hear ANYTHING. The stations they were working weren't even really weak, they just weren't there. So I shut the radio off and went to sleep. I thought conditions would be a little better Sunday morning, so I got up at 1100z like the night before. You'd think I would learn the first time.

The 1100z hour yielded a pathetic 63 qso's. That time would have been much better spent sleeping. During sunrise and the morning runs I made the exact same mistakes I made the day before. I was trying to run 10m instead of staying on 15m where the better rate was. I wasted a LOT of time on 10m trying to work Europe, and everytime I went to 15m again, the rate was back up. I was just convinced that 10m had to be better than 15m. I think that was major mistake 6? I lost track a long time ago. I had a lot of off time to take, and my spreadsheet with my plan on it had gone down the tubes by 0400z the first day. I decided to alternate hours off during the last few hours of the contest. Probably the best thing I did was not try to run the very last hour. I worked 21 mults in the last hour, almost all 3 pointers in South America, which I had neglected a little bit. I knew I had screwed up a lot and I was pretty bummed by the time 0000z rolled around on Sunday. My friend Terri showed up about 30 minutes after the contest, which gave me time to shut things down and pack up, and get my head cleared. The first thing she said to me was that I was green. I was coughing all weekend, but I really didn't feel all that bad. There were a few times where I thought I was going insane because the room wouldn't stop spinning, but I was pretty focused on the contest. But sitting in a chair for many hours on end will dull your senses a little bit.

As soon as I got in the truck I could tell I was a little bit sicker than I thought. We must have pulled over 10 times in the first half an hour of driving. It's been a long time since I was that sick. I went to the doctor that night and it's a good thing. I had bronchitis that was turning into pneumonia real fast. Instead of getting back to school on Monday as planned, I got back at 1am on Thursday. It's a good thing it was a medical excuse, or that would have cost me a lot of money retaking second semester!

The score wasn't as high as I had wanted, but I had learned many valuable lessons. They were all rookie mistakes, and learning the hard way is sometimes the best way. It was my first time experiencing propagation from the east coast, and it was completely different from anything I've seen before. If I could do it again, there is probably 100 things I would different. It was fun hearing the guys at WL7E (KL7Y) from somewhere else. Dan's station is awesome, and the signal in Georgia is the loudest from Alaska. Late Sunday on 15m KL7RA was about s7 or s8, and WL7E was solid 20 over 9. 15m is a strong band from KL7Y, but they were still the loudest KL7 on every band I heard them on. My score would have definitely been lower had I not researched propagation and asked around for tips ahead of time. I did the same thing for my CQWW CW Single op from N6HR as N7IP. That contest went bad when I didn't have 40 meters, so I got 8 hours of sleep a night. I did manage to beat every other W7 on 10 20 with just a tribander.

Going from a M/M to a SOAB is very difficult. It's not the staying up all night that will get you, it's trying to maximize the score for all bands, instead of just one. At a M/M you concentrate entirely on the band you are working at the moment. You don't think to yourself, "Is it time to move?" Instead, you work the best rate, and chase mults, and always have a presence on the band. Single op, at least with one radio, you are limited in the amount of short, exotic openings you work. SO2R solves a lot of that problem, but I haven't gotten to that hurdle yet. (Although I really want to.) Single op is a lot of fun, but M/M is the most fun. You can still get all the operating time you want, plus you can take a break for food if you want, talk with others during breaks, work those exotic openings, and really maximize a band. You're trying to do as well as you can on all bands for an entire 48 hour period with no restrictions. That's pretty cool if you ask me.

Thanks to Bill, W4AN, for letting me use his great station, and also to my friend Terri who is the best person in the world and let me take a break from school at her beautiful home. I had a blast in Georgia, and I will definitely be back... contest or no contest.