A crew of contesters competed in the 2022 CQ WPX RTTY contest from the Robertson contest site. This contest was held over the weekend of the 12th and 13th of February.
We used the WARS club’s contest callsign VK2W.
We competed from the contest start time of 1100 local time on Saturday morning to around 0130 on Sunday morning, took a break, and then resumed operations at daybreak on the Sunday and continued to 1530 on Sunday afternoon.
In attendance were –
Skip VK2ALR
Barrie VK2IBE
Stephen VK2RH
Erik VK2EJH
Nick VK2MYK
Bob VK2NRC
Fred VK2WS
Upon arrival on Saturday we initially worked to erect a dipole for 10m and later (when the rain eased off) another dipole for 20m. These antennas supplemented the permanently installed 15m and 40 dipoles.
The mast and 10m antenna erection activities occurred in persistent drizzling rain and it wasn’t long before we were very wet despite wearing rain gear.
We initially started operating on 10m. We made 21 contacts before the waterfall became rather blank. So, we switched to 15m and continued.
Towards evening we switched to 40m.
Over the weekend we tried 20m several times however there were no RTTY signals to be found on that band. In fact the whole band appeared rather quiet for signals of any type. We suspected the antenna may have a fault, so we replaced it. We had an extra dipole for 20m already tuned and was quite simple to drop the original and install the new one (and it wasn’t raining). However, the 20m band remained rather dead to us.
We repeated the pattern of using 10m and 15m on Sunday. On Sunday afternoon, many of the stations that we could copy were duplicates as we already had them in the log. So our QSO rate dropped off.
At the conclusion of operations we had 141 RTTY contacts in the log.
Interestingly the RBN had 22 nodes report receiving the VK2W RTTY CQ calls, with a total of 205 RBN reception reports.
With people needing to return to Sydney at a reasonable time on Sunday we took down the temporarily installed mast and antennas and departed the contest site at 4pm.
Many thanks to all that came along. Thanks to Barrie for hosting us and providing the catering. It is much appreciated.
73 Fred VK2WS
