Hawke’s Bay, North Island, New Zealand                   IOTA OC-036                CQ zone 32             ITU zone 60            Locator RF80LQ

CQ Worldwide 2010 contest reports from ZM4T

CQ WW CW 2010

With waning interest in CW, we struggled to field a team in CQ WW CW this year but Gary ZL2iFB, Holger ZL3IO and friend Frank DL1KWK (on holiday in ZL and, by pure coincidence you understand, passing through Hawke’s Bay on the last weekend of November) gave it a go with a semi-casual multi-single entry.

The contest got off to a late start after Gary forgot to bring some essential leads.  Deborah kindly offered to bring them from home but on the way unfortunately drove into a calf that had escaped from a nearby field.  Both were rather shaken up.  Anyway, Gary finally got the station in order and went on the air at around 00:30z with a promising run on 15m to kick things off.  Holger and Frank arrived on site around 02:30z and while Gary slipped back home to check on Deborah and the slightly modified Peugeot, the decision was made to move the station across the shed nearer to where most of the antenna cables would come in, and to run UCX log instead of N1MM, meaning a further 2 hours off air.

The first evening and overnight session gave us the chance to catch up a bit with excellent pileups on 15 and 40m.  10m was open to EU but the 15m piles were just too much fun to switch over ... with hindsight, we should have made the most of the opening as 10m barely flickered to life for the remainder of the weekend.  Our traditional fish and chip supper on Saturday was kindly delivered by Lee ZL2AL and that helped get us through the long Saturday night - Gary sleeping soundly while Holger and Frank took turns at the radio.

On Sunday morning with 1,400 QSOs in the bag, Gary took over at dawn when Frank had to leave and Holger took him back to his expectant family.  Sunday was steady with 15m once again being the main money band. 

Using Holger’s laptop with its DL keyboard layout and UCX log, while battling sleep deprivation and busy pileups was ‘interesting’ for Gary but eventually he got the hang of sending CW with the paddle on the right hand while correcting the log with the left (while playing the bass drum with his left foot, kazoo on a frame and cymbals between his knees).

The broadband Internet connection dropped out, presumably due to low signal levels despite the Vodem-on-a-stick approach, leaving us with no DXcluster access.  The failure of the PA driver stage in Holger’s K3 meant putting Gary’s K3 on the run, leaving multiplier hunting rather restricted on a standby rig (though Frank and Holger managed some 350 QSOs under their own calls on the second radio, just for fun: there’s no stopping keen contesters!).

The pileups were reasonably well behaved in the main apart from a few overexcited and basically rude callers calling out of turn and one persistent lid who did his level best to stop us working what we think was probably R1ANC.  That would have been a new multiplier, so we were keen not to let it drop.  Despite being asked at least 3 times to wait, the lid persisted in sending us both our calls and his report, several times, blatting out the weak station we were trying to work.  R1ANC(?) gave up, unfortunately, before we completed so we returned to working the pileup, studiously ignoring the lid who was still plaintively calling us fully 10 minutes later when he finally seemed to get the message that we really weren’t going to work him.  We wouldn’t be surprised if he reported us as being deaf on DXcluster but with no cluster access on site, it made no difference anyway.

By Sunday evening we realised we had the prospect of a making decent entry after all, despite the problems, and might even beat last year’s multi-two score.  At 7pm local and about an hour before sunset, we decided to try 80m as we had heard ZL8X working US and EU on 80m at that time in the week before the contest.  Sure enough there were plenty of DX sigs at reasonable strength but the daylight absorption made it hard going until at 7:15pm the floodgates opened and we milked the greyline longpath into Europe.

Gary took the long overnight stint from 2am to 8am local time and was pleased to have enough QSOs to stave off any drowsiness.  Topband was almost a dead loss though: we could hear various Asian stations quite well around 16:30z but most evidently couldn’t hear us at all.  Maybe the nearby trees or the steel support cable are absorbing too much of the RF from our wire vertical?  Or maybe conditions were really as bad as some have said.

For the final few hours on Monday morning, we kept on pushing right up to the end, bagging a couple of very welcome double-mults from South America on 10m in the last half hour.  An hour later, the site was clear and we headed home, tired but elated after our casual entry turned out to be more fun than we envisaged.

Looking over the score breakdown, 20m once again seemed below par for no obvious reason.  We’ve subsequently found out that a solar flare occurred during the contest but we didn’t notice it on site - normally we hear waves of white noise and rapidly varying conditions as charged particles rain down on the ionosphere.  It could just be that everyone was too busy enjoying themselves on 15m to make use of 20m.

With some final log checking still to do, our claimed score will be around 3.7 million points from 3,451 QSOs.  We won’t dislodge ZM2K’s 1999 multi-single ZL record of 6.3 million points but we sure had fun trying.  At least we beat our multi-two score from last year.

CQ WW SSB 2010

CQ WW SSB 2010 turned out to be our best ever.  Gary ZL2iFB laughingly suggested an outrageous target of 4,000 QSOs multi-two.  Our previous best effort was around 3,000 QSOs and just over 3 million points.  We ended up with over 4,680 QSOs and more than 6 million points thanks to a great effort by all.

Operators were: Lee ZL2AL, Stan ZL2ST, Gary ZL2iFB, Holger ZL3IO, Michael ZL2MY, Wayne ZL2WG, Phil ZL2RVW, Peter ZL2LF and Mike ZL2CC.

A few weeks before the contest we had a working bee at the site to mount a new 5 ele 15m yagi in place of the 3 ele tribander.  We also re-jigged the big 80m and 40m fullwave wire loops to take advantage of a gap in the tall trees after several had been felled, and fitted a QRO toroidal balun and 70 ohm matching section to the 80m loop.  All the antennas performed extremely well.  Traditionally, we install and check out the antenna systems and equipment on Friday and play radio Friday night and there was the usual DX around this year.  We worked about 137 countries in CQ WW.

10m was a bit of a disappointment with just 30 QSOs in the log, thanks to the SFI hovering just over 80 for most of the weekend.  15m was hot with long runs and huge pileups at times, and it was amazing to hear the band still lively into Europe at 1am local time.  15m gave us nearly half our total with over 2,200 QSOs.  The 80m and 160m totals were down from last year probably as a result of the SFI increasing a little.  40m was surprising and yielded our highest QSO score for that band ever.  The band came into its own this year as almost all the broadcasters have moved and we were able to operate simplex world wide for the first time. The 40m vertical ended up being the prime antenna: the two 40m wire loops worked fine but their proximity to other antennas caused some interference on the other bands.  Aside from that, interference between stations was considerably reduced because of a new high-isolation antenna distribution box/patch panel (below) and the baluns.

Our original but rather unwieldy ZM2M callsign was shelved in favour of the new ZM4T club call.  On SSB, “tango” is more distinctive than “mike” which meant less repeats.  It will be interesting to see how well it plays on CW.

Broadband access at the site is rather tenuous but with Gary’s networking expertise it worked out for us this time.  We’ve finally found a sweet spot high up in the shed where a 3G broadband modem gets 3 bars out of 6 on the S meter and that’s as good as it comes, even outside the shed.

After some prodding by Gary, Lee ZL2AL made the decision to switch to N1MM Logger for the contest as it does offer some advantages in its operation and connectivity.  Club members duly downloaded and tried out the software at home before the contest and Gary held an N1MM “master class” on site on the Saturday morning to address any remaining queries about using the program.  N1MM Logger worked out better than Writelog so we plan to continue using it in future.

The two Kenwood TL-922 linear amps worked fine apart from a hiccupping relay problem in one that needs a closer look before the next contest.  The FT1000s were OK too apart from a deafening monitor level from the voice box on one.

All in all the weekend was very rewarding and the efforts of all the team paid off with the best score ever.  We all experienced a great sense of accomplishment at the end of the contest!

Plans for the following year include maintenance on the 20m yagi, shortening the 15m yagi to work a little better up in the phone portion of the band, checking the match on the 10m yagi and installing rotators for all three beams.

73, Lee ZL2AL

Oceania DX 2010 report from ZM4T

After spending several weekends on site preparing the station for another season, it was a pleasure to turn up, connect up and operate the Oceania DX contest in the new multi-one and multi-two categories with our new line up of monoband antennas:

• 160m quarter wave wire vertical
• 80m full wave wire loop
• 40m quarter wave rooftop vertical plus full wave wire loop
• 20m three element Yagi
• 15m five element Yagi
• 10m four element Yagi.

All the antennas worked well, although 10m refused to liven up for us despite hearing a decent 10m opening just a few hours before the start of the SSB leg.  40m was in good shape and we even managed a few topband SSB QSOs to prove that the antenna radiates.  The new 15m beam worked like a charm, giving us our best ever set of 15m multipliers with loads of W and JA prefixes in the log.

The new antenna patch panel gizmo (right) worked nicely and, along with homebrew QRO baluns on the 80m loop and 15m Yagi, helped reduce the inter-station interference we normally experience.  The only time we noticed anything amiss was with the 15m beam beaming directly away from the 40m vertical: a 40m band pass filter cured that little third harmonic problem.

For the SSB multi-two entry, the radios (2 x FT1000s) and amplifiers (2 x TL922s) did a great job too, with just one failure during the contest - a dodgy microswitch in a foot switch which was quickly dismantled and repaired in the workshop by Lee ZL2AL.

Lee’s happy face peers over the top of the shed roof.  What a way to celebrate your birthday!

The computer network was a bit of a mixed blessing this time.  The shack WiFi network worked well, but poor cellphone signals and LAN problems prevented us from connnecting to DXcluster throughout the contest.  A bug in N1MM (now fixed) also meant we were giving out sequential serial numbers across all bands, rather than separate sequences on each band. 

We had a good turn-out of accomplished contest operators: in the SSB section were Gary ZL2iFB, Lee ZL2AL, Mike ZL2CC, Mike ZL2FAR, Peter ZL2LF and Wayne ZL2WG.  Between us we racked up 1,500 QSOs and over 700 multipliers, giving us a claimed score of around 3.3 million points.

In the CW leg multi-one section, we used an Elecraft K3, Amp Supply Co linear and the same antennas, except that the 40m loop gave us the capability for diversity receive on all bands except, paradoxically enough, for 40m itself where there was too much RF pickup from the vertical transmit antenna.  The CW ops were: Gary ZL2iFB, Stan ZL2ST, Mike ZL2FAR and Holger ZL3IO.  Our SSB score made a natural target and by early Sunday evening we passed the SSB total with several hours of good runs still to go.  In the end, despite having fewer QSOs we made 3.9 million points thanks to extra multipliers - fantastic!

A new club call: ZM4T is born

Following CQ WW SSB 2009 in the usual post-mortem meeting, we discussed the need to change our callsign.   While ZM2M is becoming recognized worldwide as a result of numerous contest entries, it’s not ideal, especially on SSB.  “Zulu Mike Two Mike” tends to disintegrate in one’s mouth after many hours of contesting flat-out, evidently mutating into “Zulu Mike Zulu Mike” to some frustrated and no doubt tired contestants on the far end.  We’ve heard “Zulu Mike Zulu Mike what’s your prefix?” once too often!

After discussing our preferences and looking at the available callsign options, we have obtained the new contest call ZM4T.  We chose the ‘4’ call because it is marginally quicker to send than ‘2’ on CW.  Likewise ‘T’ is shorter than ‘M’ on CW, but no so short (like ‘E’ or ‘I’) that it gets lost in the noise.  “Tango” is a distinctive, easily-pronounced phonetic for SSB contesting too, so we’re sure it will help.

So ... listen out for “Zulu Mike Four Tango” or “ZM4T” in the 2010 contests.  Yes, it’s us.

CQ WW SSB 2009 report from ZM2M

The 2009 CQ Worldwide SSB contest turned out to be one of the best ever for ZM2M, a vintage year for sure.  Gary ZL2iFB suggested an outlandish target of 3,000 QSOs (our previous best had been around 2,700 QSOs) and 3 million points.  We ended up with over 3,500 QSOs and claimed around 4 million points.  It was a great effort by all. 

Traditionally, we arrive on site, install and check out the antenna systems on Friday and play radio Friday night since the contest doesn’t start until our Saturday lunchtime.  This year we installed a new elevated 40m vertical on top of the corrugated iron shed roof, an excellent ground plane.  The tilt-over base fitting (fabricated on site by Lee ZL2AL using a massive welder, some scrap iron and copious woggles) was mounted permanently in place by Lee, Mike and Holger ZL3IO so that the vertical may be “walked” up into place in just a few minutes.  The second new antenna took a bit longer: we fired a line over a 30m tall pine tree (below) with the spud gun and under Gary’s able leadership, a 160m quarter wave wire vertical was hauled up into place over an extensive earth radial system painstakingly laid out in the forest by the team.  Both antennas performed extremely well, working into VE3, G, W, JA and RA on 160m the Friday night.

Saturday saw a solid 10m opening into JA with a run of over 100 QSOs and Sunday yielded another 10m opening into the USA.  10m has finally started to awaken with the SFI over 80 for most of the weekend.

15m was hot too (though never too hot!) with long steady runs and big pileups at times.  15m gave us nearly half our total QSOs with over 1,500 in the log.

80m and even 160m totals were down from last year, largely as a result of severe QRN, specifically frequent, long-lasting S9+++ static crashes on the Sunday night.  With hindsight, perhaps we should have made hay while the sun shone on the low bands on the Saturday night but even then conditions were down compared to the Friday.

With longstanding problems obtaining a reliable Internet connection at ZM2M, Gary finally got it working with a WiFi access point in the shack running on a long lead from a new 3G Vodem in the house.  3G and even old-fashioned 2G cellphone coverage at the site is rather tenuous at times with poor signals and occasional dropouts.  In addition, despite the two station computers each being able to access DXcluster on the Internet reliably through the same WiFi AP, we could not get them to share their logs via TCP/IP and came to the conclusion it must have been a networking problem in Writelog.  Lee made the decision to switch to N1MM’s contest logging software for the next contest as it does offer some advantages in its operation and connectivity.

We are still dogged by amplifier problems.  We began the contest with 2 x Kenwood TL922s and a Heath SB220 as a spare.  One TL922 blew up its step-start circuitry and was replaced by the SB220 but extremely high plate current meant that was a non-starter also, despite a perfect soak-test at home before the contest - Murphy strikes again!  A quick 100km round trip home by Gary saved the day with his old but reliable LK550 amplifier.

As Gary will be in another part of the world for the CW leg of this contest, there may only be Holger, Stan and Lee to do the honours for CQ WW CW.  We will probably do a multi-single radio effort. 

All in all, the SSB weekend was very rewarding and the efforts of all the team paid off with the best totals ever and a great sense of satisfaction when it all came together on the weekend.  We enjoyed ourselves immensely and really gelled and worked well together as a team.  “The best weekend ever” said one tired but happy ZM2Mer, and “what a rush!!!” said another.

73 de Lee ZL2AL, Stan ZL2ST, Gary ZL2IFB, Holger ZL3IO, Michael ZL2MY and Mike ZL2CC.  See you in the CW pileups!

Oceania DX CW 2009 report from ZM2M

Earlier in the year, having never entered the Oceania contest, we decided to give it a go from ZM2M for a change.  As most of the antennas were still down since the last WPX, an intrepid advance party met on site on the Saturday morning to get the station up and running in time to start the contest at 0800z (9pm local) on Saturday.  The on-site team was Stan ZL2ST, Mike ZL2FAR, Holger DL7IO (now ZL3IO, pictured here, another asset for the ZM2M team), Gary ZL2iFB and team leader Lee ZL2AL.  It was a hard morning, weather wise, with cold Southerlies and rain, but worthwhile.  The 80m loop is now set up in the wood behind the shack “permanently” and simply needs to be connected to operate.  The 40m loop is easily erected in the “dog paddock” and the 10m beam is simple to erect on a short pole.  The remaining beams remain fixed in place.

We entered the Multi Op/Single Transmitter category.  The contest started well and business was steady for most of the 24 hours, with the usual afternoon lull enlivened by working JAs on 15m (many thanks to all who took a moment out of the JA contest to swap numbers with us!).  The new 80m loop plays very well and we had the same good results with the 40m loop as last year with positive reports and no problems footing it in the pile-ups.  There were good runs on 40m and 20m, and 15m opened for a while both days.  Gary valiantly chased QSO #1000 in a final fling on 40m into Europe on Sunday night but finished just a few short.   Overall, 40m was our money band, combining good QSO rates, plenty of multipliers and reasonable QSO points.  Here’s our claimed breakdown:

Further station improvements are planned, hopefully in time for CQ WW in Oct (SSB) and November (CW) including:

1.  A 40m vertical on the tin roof of the workshop.  Jimmy, our gracious landlord, is happy for us to put up a permanent fitting in the middle of the workshop roof so that we simply plug the actual radiator in to a hinged base, walk it up, pop in a locking bolt and we’re good to go.  “Canadian enforcer” and grinders in hand, Lee welded a heavy-duty custom-made hinge fitting together on site during the Oceania contest and will make up the vertical element in the next few weeks.

2.  We may swap the tribander for a 15m 5 element Yagi, giving us separate monobanders on the three high bands 10, 15 and 20m.  A remote antenna switch would make band changes easier too.

3.  We will put up a permanent 160m inverted-L in the woods.  There is a 30m high tree almost in the clear which would work quite nicely and, with no passing livestock or people to worry about (other than crazy contesters anyway!), we can safely leave lots of radials permanently in place.

4.  The Internet connection wouldn’t work at all this time, despite using the same equipment as always.  Gary will fix that.

5.  The 10m beam needs a little fine adjustment to address strange hoof-shaped bends in some of the elements.  Several cows in the vicinity were looking sheepish when we arrived on site ...

We really enjoyed our weekend and got a lot done, leaving much less left to do before the main event of 2009, CQ WW.  We are getting ever closer to our goal of being able to go to the site and simply connect up gear to the feedlines as we are all  weary of spending hours hauling up and pulling down antennas for every single contest.

Thanks to all who helped.  Stan has agreed to prepare and submit the log.  After checking, Gary will upload the log to LoTW “soon as”, as we say.  Please QSL via ZL2AL and/or LoTW as usual.

Updates on our progress towards CQ WW will be published here in further bulletins.  Come back soon for the latest thrilling installment!

73 de Lee ZL2AL and all the East Coast Contesters at ZM2M.

CQ WW CW 2008 report from ZM2M

We entered as a multi-single effort by a few local members, making over 1,000 QSOs.  We have uploaded the log to LoTW so if you worked us in the contest and use LoTW, your QSLs should be showing already.

CQ WW SSB 2008 report from ZM2M

2008 marked the East Coast Contesters’ third foray into CQ Magazine’s World Wide SSB contest.  While we have fared well in other contests, CQ WW remains the premium contest of the year which tests every individual and team nearly to destruction. 

Each of the three years has seen an improvement in our gear and operating skills.  We wish we could say the same for radio propagation this year.  10m was mostly dead in ZL - we listened frequently but apart from an all-too-brief JA opening, we didn’t even hear any beacons.  On the upside, the low bands were fantastic.

We concentrate on the Multi-Op Two Radio High Power (“M2”) category.  The M2 rules allow two transmitted signals simultaneously and no more than 8 band changes per station per hour, so we had to be careful when passing multipliers between bands.

2008 highlights

• The computers were networked with a DXcluster feed via Telnet over the Internet, giving us a continuous feed of new multipliers;
• Firing up the new 4-ele 10m Yagi and running JA’s for a short while on an otherwise dead band;
• Running flat out on three new antennas: high delta loops for 40m and 80m and a bent dipole for 160m;
• Murphy generally left us alone for once;
• Bringing 3 new ops into the team which added another dimension to scheduling as well as an injection of fresh ideas and skills;
• Being called on 15m by VU4RG on Andaman and 2 contacts later being called by JD1BMM on Minami Torishima;
• Working HC8A and other mults on topband (HC8A worked several Europeans and said topband was “the best I’ve ever heard it”.  Operator Rich N6KT made 7,500 QSOs and 14.9 million points, an outstanding single-op performance given such poor HF condx);
• Running both 80m and 40m overnight - both bands were wide open in the dead of night;
• Working split on 80 & 40m to keep the rates up;
• working a little EU pileup on CW before the contest started;
• Scoring around 2.7 million points from 2,500 QSOs, 123 zones and 290 countries (unchecked).

2008 lows

• One of the team caught a bad wave while surfing, broke his collar bone and so missed the actual contest - get well soon Stan;
• Despite all the effort to build and erect it, our new 2 ele 40m wire Yagi was a dog.  Maybe it was too low and was adversely affected by nearby structures and antennas?;
• Only two pieces of gear failed but fortunately the worst one happened during testing prior to the start (an amplifier blew up while it was sitting there on standby, not even being used!).  The other was an electric jug that let released its smoke with a bang.  Luckily we had spares for both - that’s contingency planning in action;
• Software parrots didn’t work, leaving us with just one external voice keyer and at times a noticeable Canadian accent when CQing!;
• Several European alligators just couldn’t hear us.  Come on guys, even with the EU QRM, running the legal limit here to decent antennas should have been plenty good enough to work S9+ stations from EU unless they are running ridiculously high power ...
• Some stations, including the odd mult, failed to confirm QSOs despite several requests and were struck from our log  :-(   If we called and worked you later and you thought we were making a duplicate QSO, it’s most likely that the first QSO was incomplete on our side.

Faux Pas

• CQing on 15m after working a prominent contest station and getting no answers, then noticing the “split” was still on so we were QRMing the very station we just worked.  Oops, sorry;
• A laptop with external keyboard repeatedly died. After the fourth time we noticed the Sleep button just to the right of the Enter key ....ah ha! The operator’s crooked little finger was inadvertently finding it!!! A piece of duct tape over the button temporarily solved that problem pending a permanent fix with superglue!  Duct tape was much in evidence this weekend;
• Having to double-check the ZL band plans after being told by someone we shouldn’t be above 7.1 MHz (we are OK up to 7.3 in ZL, also from 3.5 to 3.9);
• Mishearing the occasional callsign character in pileups and causing grief for those trying to complete accurate QSOs with us (sorry, we did our best!  Thank you for persisting, and raspberries to those who continually called over the top of you).

Equipment

• FT1000D - the main run station
• FT1000MP MK V - the second station
• FT990 - for mult hunting, 10m checking and contingency purposes
• Kenwood TL922, Amp Supply LK550, Heath SB220 and Ameritron amps
• TH3 mark 4 tribander
• Home brew 4-ele 10m Yagi
• Force 12 4-ele 20m Yagi
• 40m high delta loop and low dipole
• 80M low delta loop and dipole
• 160m dipole with a slight dogleg, centre at about 20m agl
• Homebrew common antenna patch panel with manual change-over
• IBM laptops running Writelog
• Wi-Fi network on 2.4 GHz
• A pair of jugs
• 2 mult bells, our “secret weapon”

Bottom line

Our main goal is always to have lots of fun and laughs while achieving both individually and as a group. Our targets were a bit ambitious given the conditions but still we improved on last year’s effort by around 15% (roughly 2.7m points to claim versus 2.4m in 2007).   The difference was clearly due to lots of juicy multipliers since our QSO total was nearly 10% down.  We gained mults on 160 and 10m, and others either on the run or searching-n-pouncing (with DXcluster assistance). Operating skills improved with experience and the technology worked better.

The score really doesn’t matter at the end of the day but it’s a pleasure when things go well and all have a great time.  We didn’t hear a raised voice all weekend, other than the usual “zulu mike two mike  -  zulu mike two mike  -  ZULU MIKE TWO MIKE” !!!.

We are already planning for CQ WW 2009.  Our logs (including all previous activities) will soon be uploaded to LoTW, hopefully to cut the QSL effort and speed up QSLing for the deserving.

73 from Lee ZL2AL and the rest of the East Coast Contesters ZM2M Team ...

Wayne ZL2WG   Mike ZL2CC   Lee ZL2AL  Phil ZL2RVW  Peter ZL2LF  Mike ZL2FAR    Gary ZL2iFB

Camera shy: John ZL2QM, Chris ZL2DX and Stan ZL2ST

Copyright © 2011 ZM2M