SJ2W Contest Station

                    CQ Worldwide DX Contest, CW

Call: SJ2W
Operator(s): SM2WMV
Station: SJ2W

Class: SOSB/20 HP
QTH: Da Traesk
Operating Time (hrs): 41
Radios: SO2R

Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Zones  Countries
------------------------------
  160:                    
   80:                    
   40:                    
   20: 4042    40      140
   15:                    
   10:                    
------------------------------
Total: 4042    40      140  Total Score = 1,608,300

Club: Worldwide Young Contesters

Comments:

What a blast! We had planned a M/S effort for this one but we felt we were short
on operators so we decided to do a couple of single band efforts instead. I did
20m unassisted with the SJ2W call and SM2LIY did SB 15 (A) with SM2M. 

I had some thoughts about maybe doing SB 40 instead but considering this might
be the last chance for some decent openings on 20m for a while in CQWW CW, I
decided to do SB 20 and man am I happy about that. Bands were open 48h but I
did sleep a bit anyway and Sunday morning sleep was longer than what I had
planned, I don't think I lost that much on it though since it had closed down
towards US. This was the first contest I used the K3 as a run radio and it took
me a while to get used to it, I didn't really feel comfortable until after maybe
12 hours with it.

Huge amount of JAs worked, 434 zone 25 which is really high considering it was
on 20m! I could work JAs pretty much all the time except in the afternoon.
During the night they came through and during the morning and day they came
through with good signals. Since the SFI was a bit low we were really saved by
some bursts of aurora during the evenings that opened up the bands and held
them open for a long time. Without that bands would have closed early and we
would have loosen our propagation's advantage up north.

We put up a new tower this summer for the inband position that is located about
450m from the other antennas. We didn't have time to get a yagi up but I climbed
up with a trap dipole that I used to QSX the band. I did not move from the run
frequency with the main radio except a few times when I needed to concentrate
to break a pileup. I tried to continuously scan the band and found quite a few
mults and stations that way. However on Sunday it was pretty much all the same
stations over and over again. I use a homebuilt switching system so I do
transmit on the 2nd radio as well which switches over the amp + antenna from
the run radio to the second radio. The run radio then gets the
"inband" antenna. The high dipole @30m worked so much better than the
vertical we used before for listening so that was a good choice to switch.

The target I had was about 3000q and to set a new SM record. I was hoping with
some luck to be able to beat the Scandinavian record set by OH6UM @OH8X last
year but I had my doubts since I knew how propagation's were then. I did manage
both and also claimed a new EU record, if now nobody else has beaten me or/and I
have been a too big LID in the log check.

Radios: K3 + TS590SG (inband)
Ants: 6/6/6el + 5/5el + 4el @EU
Amp: SB-220 (Borrowed from SM2EKM)
N1MM Logger+

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