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IARU HF Championship 2019

Still not being in a ham radio mood and with the current solar affairs, I didn’t have plans for this year’s IARU contest. However my daily check of the DX cluster on Friday revealed EU-NA QSO on 10m CW. Aaahhh, that made me curious.

I had to attend a family event on Saturday. I agreed to join my parents and siblings as I had decided to skip the contest weeks ago. I came home late in the afternoon and raised the tower just one level. Nothing serious in the works so the tribander at 15m AGL would do. I wasn’t too motivated to bunk into a hot shack so I waited until the sun dived behind the horizon and a cool breeze provided at least a feeling of coolness. At 2056 utc –pretty late– NR4M was the first of ten US contacts on 10m in a row.

My last previous 10m contact with USA was KC1XX on August 4, 2018. Then N4YDU (Hi Nate!) on November 24, 2017. Two contacts in two years. Imagine my excitement now! I was a little late to the party though because after YV5AM and three EU HQ stations, it was down to 15m. A bunch of W/VE contacts there too this late in the evening. I decided to call it a day around UTC midnight which translates to 2AM local time.

I started the day late on 40m: 6AM utc. DX signals were hard to find and I only managed to work five Americans. I played a little more but got limited to 20m. The propagation on Sunday did not offer something beyond EU on 21/28 MHz. It seemed to have been nothing but a short lived burst of enhanced propagation the days before.

I quit with 344 QSO on the counter; half of them on 14 MHz and the other half balanced between 40/15/10. It was good to see everything in and around the station still seems to work and I still have enough skills to copy 40 WPM callsigns even with months of not copying a single dit or dah.

 

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