1999 CQ World Wide DX CW Contest from N5XU

de AA5BT

The club rarely does anything serious for this international CW contest, the largest international one of the year, because it usually happens over the Thanksgiving weekend and many club members are out of town. However, I'm usually here and I ``noodle'' in the contest - that is, work just the interesting stuff (new band-countries or, many years ago, just new countries.) Before the 1999 contest, I emailed club members saying that I'd be at the station over the weekend and would be happy to have visitors - I assured even the most CW-challenged that they could do a WAC (Worked All Continents) in less than an hour, and a DXCC (100 different countries) over the weekend.

Johanna Preston W5JLP operating at N5XU in the 1999 ARRL November Sweepstakes, CW.

Three club members took me up on the offer - Monique N3TNN, and sisters Louisa KB5LBN and Johanna W5JLP, all of whom came to the shack to sample some CW contesting. We weren't able to use the amplifier because of some RF feedback making the CW note bad (a separate story,) but even with 100 watts N5XU puts out a healthy signal. None of the three visitors felt too confident about sending their calls at 30 wpm, so we used the Super CMOS Keyer III at the shack, with each of us entering our calls into different keyer memories. (This meant that each of us was able to send our own call correctly at least once.) And so to the contest.

Sending your call fast is easy with a memory keyer, but you have to be able to recognize your own call coming back - this wasn't a problem for any of us, even when the calls (and of course the contest exchange ``599'' plus a one- or two-digit number for the station's zone) came back at high speed (most CW ops can recognize their own callsign, if nothing else, at very high speeds.)

The first victim was HC8N in the Galapagos Islands, operated by world-class contester Trey N5KO (ex-WN4KKN and one of our famous alumni.) We each worked Trey on 10 meters with our own callsigns, and again later on 15 meters. By now, all the ops were less nervous, and achieving WAC seemed like a good goal to shoot for, and all of us did it, thanks to QSOs with ZS6EZ in South Africa, AH7DX in Hawaii, OM5M in Europe and JL1ARF in Japan. Oh yes, and KG4RF in Guantanamo Bay, for North America. Other stations around the globe were worked too, with most of them hearing our 100 watts on the first or second call. Flushed with success, the three visitors left, and I did more noodling. Johanna came back later and worked a station in Antarctica for completeness (although not required for the WAC award,) and other goodies in Ghana, Ascension Island, China, Hong Kong, and so on.

Other stuff I worked while noodling around included Malaysia, Monaco, Morocco, Reunion Island, Sao Tome, Albania, Uganda, Tunisia, Solomon Islands and Macao (oh, and Russia on 80M - all with 100 watts). I was able to work Trey at HC8N on all 6 bands 10-160M, adding a few QSOs to his total of more than 7000, which almost certainly was the World-Wide high score for a single operator using all six bands. Well done, Trey! - a well-deserved victory after coming so close in previous CQWW CW contests.

I'm Trey's QSL manager, so I was able to present the other club ops with color QSL cards soon after the contest. I was pretty proud of all three ops, and I think they were all even more enthusiastic about operating CW after the contest (all four of us are violinists - is there a connection there?)

The next opportunity for similar fun will be during the ARRL CW contest; there is not quite as much rare DX on the air as there is during the CQWW contest, but there is plenty of interesting new stuff to work. I plan to be at the station over the weekend of the contest, which starts at 6PM local time on Friday, February 18, and goes for 48 hours. You don't have to be a violinist, and you can do as much or as little of the contest as you feel like. See you then!