I worked the ZQ prefix and a 5X (maybe a new one?) on 17 CW. Then it hit me: I still needed 7O on 20m SSB. Luckily they were active but there was HUGE QRM. Someone had recorded a QSO from a OH station and was playing it on top of 7O6T with the S-meter deflecting to S9+40dB! Ouch. This went on for several minutes with the recording playing in a loop. I was fascinated by the bestial practices of this QRM’er. Not only for the QRM itself but for the abuse of the OH call. The QRM came in from around 120°, which is also the bearing for 7O from my QTH. Then the QRM stopped and with a few calls I was able to log Yemen on 14 MHz phone.

I regret not having logged them on 40. There was a spot last night but the QRM was just horrible.  Jammers, simplex callers, cops – the whole shebang. I wonder what some of the callers in the pile ups think. There is absolutely no way they will ever work the DX if they don’t listen. That is their problem but they make it ours by keeping on calling. Since the QRM on the DX QRG made 7O6T disappear, I took some time to listen to the pile up. I’m starting to think some of the callers don’t know how to copy a dit or a dot.

I called it a day before becoming more cynical and went downstairs to join the XYL. Now that Yemen has opened the door for ham radio, I’m hoping there will be another expedition there for a major contest like CQ WW CW. I’ll fill the low band slots then. 7O is an easy path from ON on the low bands. I’m confident I’d pull it off in a WW CW.

Thanks and a tipping my hat to the 7O6T crew for 11 contacts.

A bigger problem was 10m SSB. They were weak at first but became louder peaking around lunch time. Too bad the XYL had promoted me to ‘chef’ so while things were cooking and roasting I went into the shack. Very dangerous indeed…

I could not hear any of the stations that were calling 7O6T on 10 SSB. Hard to follow the pile up pattern then. Yet the operator worked EU at a steady pace. Then he worked a KH2 and as a result spent the next minutes listening for Pacific DX. This was the only time he announced where he was listening. Come on dude, my meat is in the oven! Then he announced a one minute QRX for the collection of the electronic logs. I had visions of lunch carbonizing. Then he worked a YK who apparently engaged into a conversation. My nerves! Then the (American sounding) operator openly started badmouthing the K3. Microphone clicks and bad AGC were bothering him and he clearly didn’t like the little TRX. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and I’ll be the first to support freedom of speech – but can we please move along here? I need 7O on 10SSB, now is the time and the lunch is about to blacken in the oven! Finally I worked them, flipped the amp into stand by and ran downstairs to serve lunch ‘à point’.

It’s safe to say I am feeling VERY P/O that my 10m SSB QSO does not show up in the latest online log! Probably the AGC distorted my callsign. Or my K3 modulation had mic clicks? Although I’m quite sure the operator had my call. Bummer!

While looking for the drill and other parts, I drove around for 2 hours in warm spring-ish weather. One of the better days lately. Or at least one of the better days I didn’t need to go to work. So I was thinking: why the #$|@ are you driving from DIY-store to hardware store, from town to town while you should be cranking up the tower and work Yemen!
When I got home, I ate and went outside. Crank up tower 2/3rd, put up WARC dipole, appreciate not becomming wet from the rain and not been blown over by the wind. I reconnected all coaxes and control cables, fire up the shack, look for 7O6T. I can be short: 4 hits in just under twenty eight minutes. 15 SSB, 17 CW + SSB and 20 CW. I tried for half an hour to get them on 40 CW but the pile up was unruly and there were jammers like ususal. Still: an all time new one, 4 times in 28 minutes…

This morning they were weak on 15. Common sense says it’s too early and the Clublog stats back this up. So off outside to drill the hole. That went like a breeze! Even with the cheap drill bit! Finished the job (pass a new tube for our water well pumping installation), had lunch and came up back in the shack. And as I type this, I just worked them on 15 CW too. That makes 5x Yemen. I hope to get a shot at some of the other bands as well. I’ll focus on CW and skip the low bands since I don’t have any antenna up right now for 80/160.

I also worked 6O0CW two times and a C31 on 40 CW. Some of my work done and a new DXCC in the log, and it’s only Saturday afternoon!

There is a but of course. First of all, the weather. The dreaded WX. For four weeks on end we’ve seen rain rain rain. And wind. Rain prevents me from doing the work I want to do. Pigs might enjoy wrestling in the mud but I don’t. Wind: two weeks ago we had a VERY windy Wednesday with an hour of storm-like gusts. So I decided to lower the tower completely. And because of the occasional thunder and lightning I leave all coaxes and control cables unplugged. Which makes me effectively QRT.

But then there was the complete surprise (at least to me) of a Yemen expedition (7O6T). Out of the blue. Little did I know! Why now? And why not announced earlier? So after a week I still haven’t worked an all time new one. I must say I’m not too keen on joining the pile ups with the tower down and the yagi low. But given the relative closeness it might work. I’d like to work them on a few bands but I must say I won’t feel bad if they suddenly QRT and I miss my chance. Wouldn’t be the first time I miss a very rare one for a new DXCC.

Last weekend we had yet another batch more of the same ‘spring’ weather: cold, rainy and a chilly breeze. So I finally did something I had been delaying for ages: reply to all incoming direct QSL. Trend: more and more I receive direct cards without return envelope or without an IRC or Dollar bills. I have always answered these in the past and paid for the stamp myself. But with a stamp for outside EU costing me more than one Euro already… I need to think this over.

There were a few exotic ones inlcuding two from China, one even came in registered. But the call was not in my log. So I scrolled back to the date and time on his card and there is was – a busted call. It was in CQ WW SSB and it might have cost me a multiplier with extra penalty! I’ve said it before: I only log when I’m 100% sure about the call and the exchange. My log said BC8COD, his card BG8GOD. So two times I copied charly where he said golf. I really don’t want to offend my fellow Chinese hams, but I think they are hard to copy in SSB. That said I’m glad they appear in big numbers nowadays. When I started in 2000, China was very rare.

I planned to chase 7O6T later this week. But the weather forecast talks about T-storms for the coming three days. That and showers. So probably neither ham radio nor working in the garden. Even the butcher was complaining about it today, that so many people complain about the weather. Bad vibes in the butcher’s store and no one buys that delicious BBQ meat so prominently on display. Today was a nice day though but I spent my free afternoon collecting materials and parts for my outside projects. If it continues, I might as well start over with a DIY / WX blog! Topics:

• Why you can’t lay bricks when it’s raining cats and dogs.
• What shoes to wear when digging trenches in very wet soil.
• How to clean a clogged waste pipe.
• The effect of sudden freeze on water filled plastic recipients exposed to the outside elements.
• What if the water pressure regulator goes south and the boiler’s safety valve opens because the water company puts enormous pressure on the distribution system?

You see that I have little time for ham radio right now…   ;o)

The CQMM contest does not appeal to me for the contest itself. No: it’s the fact that you work tons of SA DX and of course it offers tons of prefix goodies for the UBA Prefix Hunt. One of the things that strike me in WPX contests: Brazil and Argentina are the horn of plenty when it comes to prefixes. Good for my PFX score. First signal: XQ1KZ on 15, 23.00 local time, sounding like the proverbial local. ZP, YV, OA and dozens of PY and LU. Yummie! Some USA but it’s late for that part of the world with the yagi 90° off. Then again on 20m and a few on 40m. For once I almost exclusively do S&P. I don’t want to run because I want to avoid too much EU. I already do enough contests like that. This time it’s the DX I’m after.

I come across YW5PI on 20 but this seems to be an expedition and not in the contest. So I put it in the DX log. At 22.38 there is a loud VK2DX on 15 long path. Worked him like a breeze. The sudden rise in SFI shows! I look him up on QRZ. Something I almost always do when I call CQ outside contests. It gives me something to read during the contacts. VK2DX is a man with a plan: he wants to make at least 100 DX contacts every single day during 2012. Wow, note to self: work him as much as you can. I decide to check 30m but QRT soon after. WX indeed is calm and online weather maps don’t show showers in the wide surroundings. Off to bed…

Sunday moring and not too much going on. Maybe today I can snatch 9M0L on the higher bands? I worked them easily and mostly by accident on 40 CW when they just started 10 days ago. I didn’t even know there was a Spratly DXpedition! On the higher bands either I couldn’t hear a thing, or the pile up scared me away (or I was QRT due to the WX). After lunch I could hear them on 12 but the band was QRM’ed by some radar woodpecker. Still I got through (tried before in the morning but no luck) but the op copied OQ5A. Tried to correct that and listen through the QRM and I was pretty sure to hear him correct to OQ5M. Done! Then try 10m. That went fairly easily. As anticipated because the yagi works great on 10 and it’s currently 1.5 lambda high. A sniff of QRO helps. That’s two QSO in fifteen minutes! In the mean time the cluster starts showing complaints of missing QSO especially on 10m…

Around this time there is a fair opening on ten meters to SA. Fair but certainly not fingerlicking like October 2011. So after a thorough sweep I head off to 15m again. I spent some time with the family and around 20.00 utc I wanted to do a final check of the bands. Better not make it too late: the alarm will ring early on Monday! Fifteen is not interesting anymore but I work a lot of new prefixes on 20 and some on 40m. There is a spot for 9M0L on 15m. I QSY and turn the beam. Strange: I hear him call CQ three times in a row without anyone answering. After that my yagi shoots straight at him and I send my call 1 up et voilà: never thought it could be so easy. 9M0L 15 CW: check! I see that VK2DX calls CQ (viva Reverse Beacon Network!) on 40 CW and jump in to work him. 2% of his QSO in the last 24 hours are made by me  HI. It’s getting late and I launch a CQ on 30. I work only EU apart from a weak JA5 and a couple of semi-weak Americans. Time for bed.

I check the 9M0L online log on Monday. The QSO on 15 is there but 10 and 12 are missing. OQ5A pops up only on 12m CW so chances are the op did not correct my call in the log although I thought he did. He gets the benefit of the doubt because of the radar QRM. Still my very experienced gut that almost never lets me down, tells me it was ok. There is absolutely no excuse for me not to be in the log on10 meters. I clearly heard him sent OQ5M three times after I asked to confirm. In the mean time I hear more grievances about missing QSO. As I am typing this on Tuesday, ON7RU tells me his missing 10m QSO is now online and I immediately check. Yes, it is there. But my 12m QSO isn’t. I hope they’ll fix this – but how? Do I have to send an email or what? I have no experiences with NIL for DXpeditions, except for XR0X in 2002 where two locals heard me work them (we were on the local VHF talking away) but I wasn’t in the online log. QSL manager N7CQQ never wanted to let me know if it was a busted call or not. “Just send your QSL card and we’ll see” he replied to my email. Yeah right, me sending greenstamps to receive my own card back kissed by his ‘Not In Log’ stamp! Or does it take Dollars to get him to check the log for a busted call? I don’t know how a QSL manager works and at what rates.   ;o)

Apart from being busy with what I call ‘civilian jobs’ (ham radio doesn’t pay the bills), premier show stopper is the WX. After a few days of so-so WX at best earlier this month, spring after WPX SSB has been very windy and rainy. And most of all: thunderish. The forecast has been announcing T-storms on and off for over ten days so I left my cables unplugged.

This weekend I wanted to work my share of SA-prefixes in the CQMM contest but there you go: T-storms announced and actually delivered. As I am typing this, another shower throws out cats and dogs and the occasional lightning bolt and the thunder roaring.

It drives me crazy: I can’t go outside and work in the garden or take the dog for a walk. And I can’t fire up the shack and make some contacts. Furthermore I’ve had it with sitting in front of my laptop! I have spent enough time inside looking at a computer screen. With the bad weather preventing me to do my garden work or filling my logbook, I finished checking the logs for UBA SSB last week. I also took the occasion (nothing better to do inside the house) to add some code that revealed some more silly stunts by sloppy participants. Belgians not knowing their own province, or their PC’s clock a few days off. I need to rewrite another piece of the code to calculate the points but I’m not in the mood right now. But all my work done over the past year has really minimized human intervention.

I hope tomorrow’s WX will be better so I can at least make a few contacts this weekend.

Today I received a nice certificate for SAC CW 2011. Pretty fast. Thanks also to the volunteers at SRAL for the very quick turnaround. Yesterday I got a direct QSL for one of the 30m contacts I reported last night. There is a reasonable demand for ON on 30m. And believe me: even more so in RTTY! ON5ZO’s little secret exposed  ;-)

I also imported all my 2012 contacts into DX4WIN. I need to answer a dozen direct cards so I need to keep track of that. I can’t think of any other HAM thing to mention. It’s what we call ‘cucumbertime’ in Dutch: only uninteresting trivia in the news because of the lack of really interesting stuff…

Around 2100 utc I came back into the shack and wanted to jump to 30m. Lonely in the 17m bandmap was a S5 spotted by a W4. Such a high frequency opening this late is rather uncommon with mediocre to poor propagation. Strangely enough I could hear some US stations call the S5. So I launched a CQ myself. For about three quarters of an hour I worked some nice DX there. Slow paced but DX: a bunch of East Coasters, W5 and W9, some zeroes, one weak W6 from CA and a few sevens from Nevada and Washington.  One K7 tricked me into copying KL7 at first. But is was ‘only’ K7, the polar flutter  I love so much on the CW tone made me think it was Alaska.

Other than this, goodies from PY, YV and even one HP1 called me. After that it was time to QRT and go to bed without 10 MHz this time. Just to say that the bands may be open at times you don’t expect.

I tried my DX luck again this morning. FK8DD was spotted on 20m. Worked him easily. I think it may be a new one, but if so too bad he doesn’t use LotW according to QRZ . I worked some other DX on 30, then tried E51M on 40m. The signal was only so-so but I’ve worked weaker ones before. Although there was not really a problem on the DX QRG, some idiot started sending ‘PIGS’ and ‘DOGS’ over and over again (hence the title of this posting) on the DX’s frequency. Bye bye DX. I tried to sit it out but the jammer just kept throwing pigs and dogs around. Until the DX noticed the dropping rate and E51M moved to 40 SSB according to the cluster so I didn’t bother anymore. A crying shame once again. I went downstairs and had me a less beefy breakfast.

Since there were 12 hours of off time to be spent, I slept the first night. I made the first QSO around 05.30 utc on Saturday. A few easy DX on 80 but I was soon out of DX. I tried running and worked mostly EU. Then off to 40m where I made an 110 QSO hour. It would turn out to be my only +100 hour. ‘Nuff said!

The bands were FULL. Overcrowded. A thick multi-layer of sticky SSB slime. Sometimes I could not squeeze in to run. At least not without harassing others. Some people apparently don’t object to that. If you don’t transmit for 10 seconds to listen to a weak signal repeating its number, they jump into the gap. Runs were hard to get and maintain. Even a packet spot did not yield the usual increase in rate. I did an unusual amount of S&P in this one. Especially on 10m where a tried a few times to run in vain.

And just like every major SSB contest, most signals between 60° and 120° from here use 10kW amps with the ‘elbow room’ function enabled on their rigs. On Sunday evening, I was about to quit. I simply could not find a place to run on 20m, it was jampacked. The typical splattering SSB sound of a full band, it drove me crazy. When a Polish powerhouse decided to completely ruin it for me by wiping out 8 kHz around me, I almost went berserk. Needless to say I did not really enjoy this contest. This time the fun was more than ever in working DX and meeting familiar callsigns again in yet another contest.

Once again it is proven that neither the operator nor the station here is made for SSB. Just change the mode to CW and keep all other parameters the same, and I make 1000 QSO more. I hereby solemnly swear NOT to use a microphone again in the next seven months. Oh wait, CQP falls in that period.

There was a running gag throughout the contest as well. Actually it was rather a tragicomedy. Remember the self-spotting clown I talked about a few weeks ago? The guy spotting himself all over in ARRL SSB? If not click here, but anyway: the circus was back in town. This time he used the same local’s callsign to spot himself 26 times over the weekend. Sometimes with less than half an hour interval. If you call CQ three times without reply, then just spot yourself! Or could it really be that the local is just a loyal SWL fan spotting his idol over and over? That is called cheerleading in contesting lingo I believe and is of course very much against the rules. But WPX Chief K5ZD probably will draw the ‘apply peer pressure’ card if a complaint would be filed. Peer pressure my ass! Imagine me sending a letter: “Pretty please don’t spot yourself, it is against the rules and it is not in compliance with ham spirit”. These cowboys just don’t care. An official note from the contest promotor with the evidence copy-pasted: “This log is rejected and you are DQ’ed. Have a nice day.” That’s more like it!

Apart from this, I feel sorry for sincere operators full of ham spirit who refrain from these obnoxious practices. Like my friend ON4BHQ on the 15m band as OQ4B puts it: his call is ALWAYS in the bandmaps because he puts it there himself. Enough of this before we get all grumpy again.