CQWW CW, 24 - 25 November 2007

HB9CZF - SO AB HP CW

CQWW CW Contest turned out to a repair contest and was not very successful. One idea was to "burn in" the newly acquired Henry 3KD amplifier and focus on the low bands.

When I arrived at the hut I tried to tune my 40/80m LW and found that the values were somewhat off and higher. The SWR could be adjusted to 1:1 but from time to time the SWR jumped to very high values. Therefore, I didn't use the PA and started with 100W only. As daylight approached I investigated the tower had to discover that the feeding line of the LW was tangled between the supporting platform at the top of the tower. After untangling the wire the values for the remote controlled LC-tuner were back to normal levels.

Furthermore I had to factory-reset the values of the SteppIR 3el Yagi. This happend a few weeks ago when I "played" too much with the antenna in the cold. After the factory default reset the SWR on all bands were back to good numbers.

Another issue I was tracing down is an intermittend bad CW signal produced by the K2/100. For a long time I thought it is a ground loop or RF in my system. The tone was reported like "T7" and later I could see on my oscilloscope a 50..100Hz hum at full power. The issue was attributed to the bias current which read 300mA instead of the recommended 400mA (for both power power transistors). I might exchange the "cheap" R6 by a high quality 10-turn version. My K2/100 does a 60km round-trip journey in my car for every contest and R6 might have been vibrated away ...

On the operating side: On Saturday morning a had a very good run towards JA. I thought JA is getting rarer these days but after logging 40+ within an hour they proved me wrong. And during the night 40m closed early. It's low sunspot number time.

Rig: K2/100 & Henry 3KD
Ant: 3el SteppIR and 41m LW
Win-Test 3.18.0

Claimed Score (6h43' operating time)

 BAND   QSO  CQ DXC DUP  POINTS   AVG 
--------------------------------------
  160     0   0   0   0       0  0.00 
   80   160  11  52   0     221  1.38 
   40    74  11  37   0     145  1.96 
   20   211  23  44   0     458  2.17 
   15     0   0   0   0       0  0.00 
   10     0   0   0   0       0  0.00 
--------------------------------------
TOTAL   445  45 133   0     824  1.85 
======================================
        TOTAL SCORE : 146 672

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