[SJDXA] Observations

[Bob Schenck]

A must read for SJDXA members getting ready for W1AW/2. 
Everyone,

I received this note from my good friend Stew, K3ND who recently participated in the W1AW/3 PA operation.  Stew has been a member of the Frankford Radio Club for nearly 40 years and has never been on a DXpedition.  He has a single tower station with a TH-7 and 2 ele 40m beam in Quakertown, PA.  

I found his observations interesting and thought you might benefit from reading about his experience.

Regards,

John Crovelli W2GD




Hi John,

Since you are the "main man" for the first W1AW/2 NJ operation, I thought that you might be interested in a few observations. These are in no particular order...

Unless you have been on a DXpedation to a rare country you probably never have experienced the pileups that you will have to deal with during W1AW/n. There is a HUGE interest in these W1AW/state operations out there in ham radio land. The pileups are huge and seemingly bottomless. I spent the first three hours of the operation on 15M SSB and they only stopped calling when the band went dead. The JAs were still calling in at 10:45PM local time. BTW, the EU guys have the worst pileup manners, but we all already knew that!

The first 4-5 days I listened up 3-5 on SSB and up 1 on CW. The pileups were always massive. All of this is quite different from the way I normally operate a DX contest. Normally, I do a fast search and pounce while keeping on the lookout for a good freq to run. Being a fairly small station, I get kicked off of run frequencies fairly often during DX contests and then I just continue the process. This operation is totally different in that you almost instantly generate a pileup when getting on a different band or mode. BTW, a LOT of guys want to work you on all bands and modes. I had a K7 tell me on 17 CW "thanks for the sweep"! WOW...

A lot of your callers will NOT be contesters as probably over half of the guys I worked were not in the Super Check Partical (SCP) database. The last 2-3 days of the operation it slows down a bit (at times) and you will be digging weak guys out of the noise, lots of 2X3 callsigns. Lots of inexperienced callers. Many times I was suspicious that I hadn't gotten a call correct and ask "do I have your call correct"? Many times I didn't but they had not corrected me when giving me a report (getting the call right is the most important aspect of the operation).  This can all be hard work!  BTW, in PA we would normally self spot whenever we opened up on a new band or mode.

You will work a LOT of mobile stations and, surprisingly, I found them to have some of the better signals. I probably worked 25-30 car/truck mobiles, two maritime mobiles, and one aeronautical mobile. The guy (an MM0 callsign) was flying his plane over Northern Scotland! This is COOL stuff.

I got a lot of "thank you for doing this operation" comments. As I said previously, there is a huge interest in these operations all over the world. The ARRL has said that they never envisioned how much interest that there would be in all of this. 

I decided, as almost the smallest station of our operating group, that I would let our big guns operate on that ever band/mode they wanted and that I would fill in where they weren't. I ended up on 17M a lot and had almost 1000 Qs on that band. I think that it worked well that way as we ended up with 10K+ more QSOs than the next closest operation (the NM guys). I know it's not a competition but......we are top dog so far.

Speaking of 17M, my Cushcraft 40M beam is a GREAT antenna on that band. I've used it for years and could work all the DXpedations and whatever DX I wanted pretty easily but I never thought about it any more than that. BTW, the antenna does have some forward gain and the F/B is about 6-8 dB. The F/S can be better than 20 dB at times. I was pointing west early one evening and a W7 in WA told me that I was the strongest signal that he had heard on 17M SSB in over three weeks. I was running 700W at the time. I never ran more than 800W during the entire operation, never needed it.

I was very honored to have been chosen as part of the PA operating team. We all operated our own stations and K3WW and NE3F had more than one station on the air at times. The last day, Chas and Bud were doing SO2R.

That's all I can think of at the moment. I was the only guy that used WinTest in the DXPED HF mode and it was flawless. GL with your NJ operation and I will be in there for a few Qs. If you need any more info feel free to ask.

73, Stew...



73. Bob Schenck, N2OO

A proud team member of FT5ZM – Amsterdam Island 2014!
Your support is sincerely appreciated!
 
www.amsterdamdx.org

Sent from my iPhone 
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