XMAS Contests, 6. & 13. December 2008

HB9CZF - SSB & CW

Rig: K3 @ 100W in SSB and @ 800W in CW
Ant: 41m LW
Win-Test: 3.21.0

The first Saturday in December the SSB part of the XMAS contest is sheduled. This time I tried SSB with my K3 for the first time. I simply took the Kenwood hand-microphone and plugged it into the K3 and gave it a go. It worked and I S&P-ed the whole contest up and down both 80 and 40m bands. It also reminded me why I don't do SSB on HF. It's way to noisy ...

The second Saturday calls for CW and this time more serious with 800W. Most of the time I called CQ but used the KRX3 to scan the band where I found six additional stations.

The following pictutures show the MUF on 13 Dec 2008 at 06:43z and 09:43z. A MUF with 2.7 MHz resp. 5.6 MHz is not much and requires groundwave propagation. Therefore, the signals on 40m were especially weak. The K7RA Solar Update published by ARRL said on 19 December 2008: "The average daily sunspot number for all of 2007 was 12.8; if we see no sunspots for the rest of 2008, the average for this year will be 4.7. By comparison, the yearly averages of daily sunspot numbers during the last solar minimum (1995-1997) were 28.7, 13.2 and 30.7. This solar minimum is much lower than the one about 12 years ago."

Did I ever mention snow? There seems to be plenty this year. Already during CQWW CW it was white and on both XMAS Contests as well. Both pictures where taken on 13. Dec. 2008 with the mobile phone camera.

XMAS SSB:

XMAS CW:

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