A bright light in the darkness!

During the last days I was in big frustration reading more antenna theory than my brain could ever  afford! I was looking into the details that I had possibly missed or overlooked all these years, and I think I am getting the big picture piece by piece (I will come back to this at a later post!).

Today I decided to take a break from reading and turn on my rig and check some things.  I was a bit dissapointed because all bands above 30m were covered by noise . I switched to 40m and heard a contest running but I did not get into the trouble of listening, I was not so in the mood.

After a while I decided to listen a bit on 40m because it was the quitest band I could use (only 3 S-units of noise)  and I heard a station hidden in the noise calling CQ. I had to hear a lot of calls to catch the prefix, and a lot more to get the whole callsign because it was just below the noise. It turned out to be JS3CTQ, a station from Japan! I was happily shocked! My next steps were to immediately hook up my PC to the rig and record the next QSOs because I did not know if this would last for long!

I moved a bit up and heard another station deep in the noise calling CQ.  I suspected this was a Japanese station also, so I kept monitoring until I got his callsign. It was indeed a Japanese station, JO1LVZ ! I stayed there longer and I noticed that a lot of stations were calling him, and he could easily get Italian and Greek stations, but a station from Poland was trying for over 20 minutes without luck. At that point JO1LVZ  was lost and I got back to JS3CTQ. Something magical had happened! The noise had dropped a bit and also the station was now heard at S6!

That was amazing! I could not believe that I was hearing a station from Japan so loud , the same time I am trying to understand why I could not hear any Japanese stations during the CQ WW DX contest!

This small experience indicates that it is possible for my setup to catch some signals from Japan (which possibly come from stations running KW on multi-element beams).

Some 20 minutes later I completely lost him (maybe he turned his beam) and I was so excited that I had to quit to prevent a stroke! Just before I turn off my rig a new station JH4UYB pops-up at about S7 !!!

OK, this is too much for me for just one day, I need to take a break !

73, SV3DJG

2009 CQ WW DX Contest – The after math

All these days I was trying to analyse the results of my operation. All I want is to know the capabilities of my station and how to improve it.

A tool to get my log and present it in various forms for analysis was required, so I did the usual web search, but I found only one tool that could help. Unfortunately, it is restricted to US regions only. I also tried to import my log to Ham Radio Deluxe because it has a mapping feature, but after some tries, I realized that in order this to work, each callsign needs to have the grid locator information. I could not get this info for all the callsigns of interest so I had to do it my way ! (note: there is available the Ham Radio Deluxe Utilities that can poll the QRZ.com database and resolve this info, but you need a subscription for this).

My solution was  to develop a small application that would analyse my data in any way I want.  It was a weekend project to implement the basic functionality required, that is, find the maximum distance worked as well as display the DXCC entities worked on a map.

An overview of the DXCC entities heard is shown on the map below (each entity is displayed only once)

Overview of DXCC countries heard worldwide

The most distant station heard was PJ4K in Netherlands Antilles, at a distance of 9425,4 km.

The main distribution is over Europe, with no African stations at all, something that I did not expect, since I have heard lots of stations from Africa with the same setup.

Overview of DXCC countries heard in Europe and Africa

A close-up of the European map shows that (at least) almost all Europe is within my reach

Detailed view of European DXCC countries  heard

Most of the DXCC countries heard were expected because previous coverage analysis showed that they are well within my station capablities for this part of the solar cycle. But, there is a big gap to the east despite the predictions of VOACAP.As I said before, lots of Chinese and Japanese stations were on air but I could not hear them.

I can think of two main reasons for this gap. The first one is that the placement of my antenna is so bad, with its proximity to the building and to various metal objects affecting the radiation pattern more than I had estimated. The other reason is that the stations were burried deep into the noise, which was  quite significant . I believe that these two reasons are related and by improving my antenna the situation will change dramatically!

With this data in hand, the next target is my antenna. I allready have some things in mind that I would like to try.

Despite the fact that I did not have any luck with US and AS, the analysis showed that a total of 141 DXCC countries were heard! This by itself  leaves room for a lot of  fun!

73, SV3DJG