contest – ZF2DX

Preparing for an amateur radio contest is nearly as fun as operating the contest. Designing, building, and maintaining a contest station brings a unique set of rewards. As does planning, practicing, and implementing an operating strategy for maximizing contest score. While both station building and operating bring a unique set of rewards, station building tends to eat up an inordinate amount of time. The time to plan, build, implement, and maintain a contest station outweighs the time spent preparing to operate that station. I’ve been fortunate to be a guest operator from the N2QV station in New York since November of 2015. While I miss the satisfaction of building and installing my own antennas, guest operating has provided an opportunity to give more consideration to operating strategy and improvement.

I’ve recently implemented some specific strategies for improving operating skills. For adults, its extremely difficult to make significant changes in any aspect of our lives. Our bodies and minds are not nearly as malleable as when we were children. However, it is still possible to make big changes, but it takes an extreme amount of effort. For the past year, I’ve attempted to hone the three following principles:

10,000 Q rule
Visual Representations
Habits Not Score

The 10,000 Q Rule

Since November of 2017, I’ve instituted the 10,000 Q rule. Simply stated, log 10,000 dual run QSOs in DXLog before a major contest. This rule was first implemented for the 2017 CQWW CW contest and subsequently in the 2018 ARRL DX CW, 2018 CQ WPX CW, and 2018 CQWW CW. That’s a total of 40,000 simulated contest QSOs with real call signs in dual run (OK, 2BSIQ if you must) mode. Seeing guys like KL9A, N6MJ, and N4YDU put up some big numbers both on and off the air was a significant motivating factor for me to learn to manage two pileups simultaneously. I’m slowly learning to run faster and still have a ways to go to catch up to the top ops. But, its encouraging to see small improvements over time. Below is a checklist that I’ve tried to follow when practicing:

1. Make 10,000 Qs before the start of the contest using DXLog in Dual Run mode.
2. Practice for at least one hour per day in ten minute increments.
3. Track number of Qs per 10 minutes, average number of Qs, Overall Qs, average pileup size, and average speed.
4. Make notes after sessions in order to document thoughts or strategies to improve performance.
5. Use a tailored database comprised of the most active DX callsigns.

Dual Run Practice — Screenshot of the Google Sheet used for Tracking Progress

Visual Representations

Because I’m cheap and a glutton for punishment, I decided to drive to New York for the 2018 CQWW CW contest. I could have easily hopped on an airplane and made the direct flight to La Guardia in about three hours but in addition to the two previously cited reasons, I also wanted the flexibility that is provided by driving. It’s nice to not mess with TSA, crowded airports, and being at the mercy of “mechanical problems.” Even easier would have been to operate the contest remotely. But I missed operating in person and am beginning to appreciate the advantages and satisfaction of being on site for contests. So a 20 hour car drive provided lots of time for mental contest preparation. The first three hours of the car ride were spent in silence attempting to create visual representations and plans for hour by hour operating strategies. This is much harder than it sounds. The human attention span is somewhere around 8 seconds, clocking in just behind that of a goldfish. During the exercise, my mind would often drift off onto random subjects and I had to constantly refocus on walking through each hour of the contest. Below is a checklist of items that I attempted to think through and visualize on an hour by hour basis for the contest:

Decide which bands each radio would be operating.
Visualize which operating strategy to use (e.g. dual run or SO2R).
Visualize specific frequencies and beam headings.
Create alternate plans in case the primary operating plan for that hour might not work.
Make mental notes of target areas outside of Europe to find.

Habits Not Score

A few hours before the start of the 2018 CQWW CW contest, I began to write down band goals for contacts, zones, and countries. After finishing, I promptly wadded up the piece of paper and threw it away. Too many uncontrollable variables impact an operator’s score that can trick that operator into feeling a sense of accomplishment or failure. Two significant ones being equipment failures and unforeseen propagation changes. Other ones happen too such as when a hurricane or massive ice storm roll through, destroying some or all of the antennas. Totally unrelated to radio life matters pop up too such as signing papers for a house closing during a contest. Regardless, judging contest performance based on a few numbers should not be the best indicator of how well that operator performed on that particular weekend. One other variable comes to mind that impacts contest results- the arbitrary system of using continents to base points per QSO in CQWW contests. It’s not uncommon for a second or third place world finisher to have MORE contacts, zones, and countries than the first place world finisher.

Judging contest performances on habits and not score seems strange. We are habituated to believe that the person or team with the highest score was the best. From a literal sense it is true that whoever has the highest score is the winner. But does that mean that person or team actually performed at their personal best? Attempting to judge contest performances based on

habits and not scores allows the operator to give a truly honest assessment of their operating prowess instead of just comparing themselves to others. Put another way, its more important to compare ourselves to how we were yesterday than to compare ourselves to other people today. A few examples of these operating habits that were implemented for CQWW CW 2018:

Call CQ for all 48 hours, preferably on two bands.
Hold at least one frequency at all times below the first 10 kHz of the band.
Make band transitions seamless.
Do not log a call unless 100% sure it is correct.
Be aggressive about moving multipliers.

While the 10,000 Q rule, forming precise visual representations, and implementing habits played a part in the final score from the 2018 CQWW CW contest, it is still true that having a big signal and even bigger ears on all bands is a must to be competitive. The 2018 CQWW CW contest provided perfect conditions for running two pileups simultaneously from the United States with the majority of those hours occurring on the low bands. It will be really exciting to see the big numbers that will be amassed in a few years when the high bands start to come alive again.

73,

Kevin, N5DX

Anyone that has ever spent time with my dad knows that he flys by the seat of his pants. Needless to say the word “plan” is truly a four letter word to him. The same was true of our planned operation for the WPX CW contest. Initially we planned to do two separate single operator sites. I had scouted both locations and both seemed like great places to operate from (especially mine). However, after operating from my place on two different occasions before the start of the contest I decided that it would be to much work for each of us to setup an all band station on our own. So instead, we decided to do a multi single operation from the location I had planned to operate from. We knew that ZF1A would be stiff competition. Dave, N5DO, Steve, AC6T, and Steve, K6AW were planning a multi single operation from the ZF1A super station. Dave sent me an email about a month before the contest asking if we would be interested in joining them for a multi 2 operation. We declined because we had already committed to operating multi single together from the Northside QTH that had been generously offered by a ham friend. The idea of setting up verticals on a beach in a major contest was just to enticing to pass up.

F1 Designs, aka K5GO, made two 40 meter shortened verticals, two 15 meter verticals to be used as a driven element and a parasitic reflector, a 20 meter vertical and then a bunch of three foot pieces of aluminum tubing to be used for whatever we may have needed. To top it all off, he also brought enough tubing for me to build a 5 element 6 meter beam. We had everything needed to put together a formidable setup on the beach.

The Thursday before the contest I received an email from my dad saying that he had found an even better location at a public beach that had access to power. This new location was under a covered cabana, complete with a picnic table and restrooms. Not to mention a direct water shot to Africa, Europe, U.S. and Japan. I liked where we had planned to operate from mostly because it was secluded and was a very peaceful location. This new place, while it was a better location in terms of signals was not secluded and the wind was very strong. Despite this, we made the decision to change our plans and setup at the new public beach location. We were still a bit unsure about what the police or authorities might say so we went to the local police station to meet officer Bill. We explained our intention and got the o.k. from Mr. Bill. My daughter, Katie, asked why we changed plans at the last minute. It was a good question and one that I didn’t have the answer to, but it was typical of the just say no to a plan initiative that my dad has been following since the beginning of time. In fairness though, it was a joint decision.

Pre contest setup Thursday afternoon did not go well. K5GO was stressed out 15 minutes into the setup. It was difficult to find all of the tubing we needed mainly because of the large quantity of tubing that we had brought with us. Sometimes less is more, and this was one of those times. After a couple of hours a 15 meter vertical was erected about 40 feet from the water’s edge. The cabana was located about 150′ from the water so we were restricted by the 100′ coax that we had to use. It was late in the day on 15 meters, probably around 5:30 local time, but we were hearing lots of Europeans and got a true 599 signal report running 100 watts from an EU station. We quickly got a 20 meter vertical erected and that band sounded good as well. Dinner was served at 7:00 so I gave my dad his marching orders for the next day which was to preassemble additional verticals and lay out the radial field for the 40 meter vertical. We were both very tired and it was not an enjoyable experience.

Friday, the day of the contest, I slaved away at work while K5GO continued setup at the beach. I had sent Dave, N5DO, an email telling him that we would be running low power instead of high power. Messing with an amplifier was just to much to ask at this point and we wanted to keep everything as simple as possible. Dave responded and said that we would still be stiff competition for them even though they would have at least a 10 dB advantage on us due to the difference in power.

Updates from K5GO were good and he was able to erect the 40 meter vertical in short order. It probably helped that I wasn’t around giving him dirty looks and sending nasty thoughts his way! Actually the 40 meter vertical was nicely packed and all of the parts were together so setup was quite easy and straight forward. Around 10:00 A.M. I received a call from N5DO. He again extended the invitation for us to join them and operate in the multi 2 category. We agreed to join them. The stress of the previous days setup along with concerns about security on the public beach for 48 hours, and creature comforts made the decision easy for both of us. While the dream of operating field day style from the beach was alluring the reality was just to difficult to implement. Especially when we had the invitation to operate from a great contest station. My dad packed the ZF2DX/P contest station into the back of his car and at 4:00 p.m. local time we joined the other ZF1A team members for some precontest strategy.

We met the guys and an operating schedule was developed.

The only thing needed was an 80 meter antenna. Fortunately, the station already had a 60 meter inverted vee that we could easily turn into an 80 meter antenna. Rates were not spectacular but they were certainly consistent throughout the contest. 15, 20, and 40 meters were the place to be with extremely loud signals into ZF from Europe and the U.S. Being in North America we are at a huge disadvantage in terms of points per contact into the U.S. Our competition in South America would be getting 3 points vs. our 2 points for every U.S. contact on 10, 15, and 20 meters. On 40 and 80 meters they

would get 6 points vs our 4 points for each U.S. contact. We would be at a big disadvantage on 10 and 15 meters as compared to the multi two operations in South America. However, we hoped we hoped that our advantage on 20, 40, and 80 meters would equalize our 10 and 15 meter disadvantage. The contest went quite smoothly and apart from a networking problem between the two computers we did not encounter any problems. PS2T was posting their score to the live score site and we watched their score intently throughout. After the first 12 hours of the contest, we had a 2 million point lead on them. However, 10 and 20 meters were dead from sunrise until around 3:00 p.m. local time. During this time PS2T clawed their way back into a virtual tie with us after 24 hours. They clearly had an advantage on 10 meters as they could hear and were being heard all over Europe and U.S. 10 was very spotty for us and we never really got anything going other than short 10 minute bursts of weak EU or U.S. We again built our lead up to over two million points after the second night. Clearly we were doing well on 20, 40, and even 80 meters where we were able to eek out nearly 200 contacts with almost all of them coming on the second night. The updated score posts from PS2T stopped Sunday morning. I have no idea why they stopped posting but I figured that we would end up in a tie with them at the end of the contest. 20 and 10 meters were even worse the second day but somehow our team kept plugging away and it looks like we ended up winning the Multi 2 category for the entire world!

The contest ended for K5GO and myself at 3:00 p.m. with the conclusion of our last operating shift. With four hours remaining in the contest, we came back to my apartment to relax for a bit. Neither of us really like to relax so instead of sitting around we decided to make the 45 minute drive to the north part of the island to resurrect the ZF2DX/P beach front contest QTH. One of our main goals was to see just how well a vertical on the water would work. Looking at the Reverse Beacon Network spots would give as a good indication of how loud we were as compared to the ZF1A station. Because of the power difference, anything within 10 dB would mean that we were as loud or louder when the power factor was taken out of the equation. A few examples from 15 meters.

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ZF1A had their beam pointed at EU during this experiment. Clearly the single elevated vertical on the beach was working quite well in ALL directions. In a worldwide DX contest, like the WPX, it is important to be loud everywhere. In the directions where the ZF1A beam was not pointed we were as loud or in some cases louder while running only 100 watts. It would have been relatively easy to put up a parasitic reflector which would have given us close to another 5 dB while still maintaining a large enough beamwidth to encompass EU and the U.S. Signals at the beach were very loud, just as they were at ZF1A. Our quick operation was a nice way to end a very enjoyable weekend. Thanks to Dave and the two Steves for inviting us to operate with them. And of course thanks to our great host Andrew, ZF1EJ for the use of his amazing station.

Tag: contest

Contest Preparation Strategies

WPX CW 2014 @ ZF1A & ZF2DX/P