The CQ World Wide WPX Contest was this weekend! In preparation I built a temporary Double Bazooka Dipole oriented East West in an inverted V for the 20m band. The antenna was not perfect, one end was almost touching my garage roof and the height was only 8m or so above the ground, you can see more about the setup here.
I decided to test it out by just activating for as long as it took to make 10 QSOs twice on Saturday and twice on Sunday at different times of day. Throughout my testing I used 50 watts of output power. The results – it worked perfectly! Over the weekend I made 41 QSOs in the 20m band in my 4 attempts – here’s a map of where they were from https://www.qsomap.com/….
Other experiments:
I have also been experimenting recently with communicating at night. Using my usual Terminated Tilted Folded Dipole (T2FD) I operated for an hour between 0100 and 0200 at night on the 40m band. Again using 50w I was able to make 10 QSOs.
I also tried using the 80m band and although I was able to receive plenty of stations I was not able to establish communication with any. At 80m my 20m T2FD antenna is very inefficient however I might try future experimentation on this band in future contests.
For a further challenge I took two 15 minute sessions on the 10m band to try to communicate with North America. This was very successful, despite the poor alignment of my T2FD antenna for the US I was able to make 10 QSOs into North America as well as a couple into South America as well as reaching into Europe and Africa.
Overall I enjoyed the short time I spent playing on the HF bands during the WPX contest – here’s a map of all the stations I communicated with:
