CQ WW SSB CONTEST FROM THE ISLAND OF RHODES
Contributed by: SV5/G0HAS
This is the story of how a late break holiday in the sun turned into a mini dx-pedition for the 2002 CQ WW SSB contest . It started on 16th September with my wife persuading me we should take a holiday ! A quick trip onto the internet and a small selection of available locations came up with Rhodes departing on 23rd October for one week, after checking the weather forecast , the holiday was booked and we celebrated with a drink contemplating what lay ahead..............then all of a sudden it dawned on me, last weekend in October? big contest on then I think, checking the web again I confirmed it was the CQWW SSB, so good chance for me to take my much travelled portable equipment and give away a few points and SV5 as a multiplier ............how do I tell the wife !!!
A few hours later, I'm back on the web (what did we do without it ), checking out the contest rules, previous years results, likely propagation and amateur activity from Rhodes. A search for SV5 and I find the web site of the Decadonese Amateur Radio Society and a list of members and their web sites, a little surfing later I come across Mike's (SV5BYR) web page and spot a banner advertising free use of the club shack for visiting amateurs, can this be true ? where is it, what equipment is available, a million questions come to mind. Finding Mike's e-mail address a rather garbled message is sent requesting further information and off I go to bed dreaming of contest pile ups and lots of dx.........and how can I explain this one to the XYL..............well.........
Several e-mails later over the next 4 weeks and a slow but constant acceptance by my wife that even a hoiday with a contest in the middle of it was better than no holiday at all ( !!) and things were set, there were wire aerials for most bands, a three element tribander, two radios, PC with dx-cluster access and a ready made shack available to me for the whole weekend, I cannot thank Mike and the local radio hams enough for the encouragement and support I got from them both before, during and after the contest.
Our accommodation in Rhodes was in the holiday village of Pefkos, some 50km from Rhodes, we opted to take the transfer to find our feet, we arrived at the hotel on the evening of Wednesday 23rd October, got some food and some rest.
Thursday morning after some hard work explaining to the hotel manager about amateur radio (thanks to the staff at the Thalia Hotel for helping) I was allowed to erect my DX antenna on the hotel roof, a wire dipole for 10m and the Icom 706 and switch mode psu which has seen extensive holiday use.
Thursday afternoon involved some hurried negotiations for a hire car and a drive into Rhodes to hook up with Mike.
After a game of hide and seek around the outskirts of the town , we finally meet up and we follow Mike to the shack to check things out. I had prewired the CQ caller various switching and control boxes and was keen to make sure it all work and inspect the antenna sytems to see if any pre contest work was needed on the Friday.
The Radio Club station is located in 'the Mayors' garden' , a nursery for all the plants and shrubs that decorate the town. The land was given to the club as recognition of their help in establishing emergency communications in the tremendous fires on the island in the 1980s . The shack and antennas were built and installed by the local amateurs .
The gardens cover around 1 acre with plenty of room for antennas, they seem to have once been the formal gardens of an old house in the grounds and provided a very peaceful and interesting place for my wife to explore and photograph whilst I was locked away in the shack.
right lets get going then
The pre contest preparation
On the Friday morning we took a drive around the island on our way to Rhodes, the centre of the island was deserted, the scenery spectacular and the views magnificent, the north coast was stunning, clouds climbing from the sea over the cliffs to the mountains, the air was warm and moist and you could smell the pine in the air from the forests, a stark contrast to the sun soaked and bleached south side of the island.
This photo above shows the view from just below the club, taking in the Temple of Apollo and take off to the east across the town and port areas.
This photo above shows the tremendous view and drop off from the cliffs above the radio club, this is the take off to the north west.
So onto the aerials and the problems, it transpired that the rotator, which had been recently repaired had broken again and was off site awaiting treatment.
The beam had been locked in position facing east, not an ideal direction. There was only one thing for it, up the tower, move the beam northwest towards Europe and onwards to North America and hope some sort of manual rotation method could be rigged up for the contest.
Unfortunately at 50 foot in the air I could not see any sensible way of rotating the antenna, so it was fixed in this direction for the whole contest.
The only hope of working in other directions was the wire dipoles, slightly inverted they should provide some contacts in other directions.
So onto the equipment, the main radio was a Kenwood TS870, the Icom 706 was used as a spotting receiver, the tribander was the main transmitting aerial, with the inverted v dipole as the secondary, a long wire was used for the 706 for rx and a homebrew audio combiner/splitter used to feed rx audio from both radios to the headphones and control tx/rx operation, a MFJ CQ caller was used with the TS870. A laptop was used for logging with CT contest logger.
This is Mike SV5BYR, testing the station out with a few calls, its surprising how a quiet band can produce a pile up after a few QSOs. Mike was an extremely good operator and I had never heard someone talk so fast, logging twenty or so contacts in around five minutes.
Artistic photo courtesy of Lynne (XYL)
THE CONTEST
So I get up at 3am local and drive to Rhodes, starting the contest at 0230z, I check out the bands, nothing on 10m yet, but 20m is alive and kicking, so CQ CONTEST from SV5/G0HAS and an immediate response from DL2NBU, over the next 15 minutes I work only 3 more stations, this is going to be hard work, but all of a sudden things pick up, looks like someone has heard me in North America, 27 contacts in the next 15 minutes with the qso rate clocking at about 120q per hour........
So I continue at a reasonable qso rate for the next 8 hours and with 530 contacts under my belt things seem quite reasonable for a single op low power station, how wrong could I be, at 1200z I hit a brick wall, the qso rate drops the QRM is unbelievable and I am being swamped be VERY loud Europeans. It appears that I am just not being heard in the States because of the wall of high power European stations between Rhodes and North America, what do I do now ?
Mike (SV5BYR) arrives at the shack and encourages me to stay on 20m and 'fight for your frequency', but however much I tried I was just not getting the contacts, it was too early to tune and pounce for multipliers and with the antenna fixed to the north west, there was little I could do anyway unless I used the dipole.........checking on 10m it appeared wide open and there was still plenty of QRM free space..........the decision was made, I'll operate on 10m and forsake my 500 odd qso's on 20m, or at least give it a try and see what running rate I could achieve.
So onto ten metres, find a clear frequency and call cq, the next 15 minutes brings 40 qsos, , all european and in zones 14,15 and 16, which isn't surprising with the beam fixed north west, this continues for the next 45 minutes and a further 70 contacts, at 1400z I get the first few North Amercian calls and as the band opens up, so the running rate continues for the next three hours, but by 1700z the band begins to close and back to Europeans only, at 1745z its all but dead so I retire with 1060 contacts in the log, equally split between 10m and 20m. 15 zones and 61 countries on 20 and 16 zones and 46 countries on 10m , its a close run thing, which band now?
On the hour drive back to Pefkos I thought about the 8 hours wasted on 20m and 530 qso, what could I have made if I'd stayed on 10m, what if I could have turned the beam, I convinced myself that moving to 10m was the right thing to do, I couldn't compete with the other Europeans on 20m who were also beaming stateside with 100w and a single tribander, the callsign helped, but what was the point if nobody could work me under a wall of QRM, on 10m the beam was more efficient, the band was much bigger and I stood a chance of keeping my frequency IF I kept developing the pile ups. I arrived back at the hotel, went off to dinner with my wife and was soon asleep.
Day 2 was not as I had planned, we awoke late, Lynne decided she would come with me today and after a swift breakfast we arrived in Rhodes at 10.00am local, lucky for me this was 0700z and the band was not yet fully open, choosing a spot frquency of 28.455 we were off 180 contacts in the first hour !!! maybe the band was open earlier after all, the next hour 190, then 170..........I needed a rest I tuned around looking for mults and then continued working the pile up, giving breaks for any qrp or dx stations (much to the annoyance of some of the stations calling, who couldn't understand why I was doing this in a contest, well I suppose I'm just a nice guy) and continued tuning around. At the end of nearly eight hours operating I had logged a futher 1000 10m contacts and in total managed to work around 30 zones and 90 countries.
As a few of the club members arrived, Mike told me that I had probably got the best CQWW SSB score from the island for 10m, but we would have to wait and see how the logs turned out. I was encouraged by this and was even more keen to come back and do it again, bigger and better . I am a keen VHF contest operator here in the UK and have tried a few HF contests from home, I've operated from a few holiday islands and given mults and points away in contests before but had never experienced the consistent pile ups that appeared in the contest, it makes you appreciate just how good some of the top HF contesters must be.
However there is a certain feel good factor that with the generous assistance from the very friendly and helpfull amateurs on Rhodes, I have given a lot of people the opportunity to work SV5, had a very cheap and enjoyable holiday and into the bargain was going home with a suntan !
We stayed on at the club, swopping stories and talking about what next, Mike was very keen to arrange a 70cms or higher eme dx-expedition, so anybody reading this with a wish to do so, get in touch with Mike at SV5BYR@QSL.NET