2024 ARRL DX CONTEST CW Review

ARRL DX CONTEST CW Review

Aiming to beat last year's score, I participated in the limited SO28MHz Low Power category.

I had the impression that recent conditions were the same or better than last year, so I was hoping to break the record.

At the start, 100Q/H at 100W was an excellent start considering that I participated from the western end of Japan.

In the first leg of the 3-hour duration, which started at 9:00 a.m. Japan Standard Time (JST), 161 QSOs were made, an increase of 60 QSOs from last year.

The second leg, which lasted five hours from around 7:00 a.m. to noon on Sunday, also got off to a good start, recording 100 QSOs per hour. However, after an hour, I was no longer called, and although I alternated between S/P and RUN, I was unable to increase my score as much as I would have liked, finishing with 395 QSOs.

I tried to make a hope in the last two hours from 7:00 a.m. JST, but there were many duplicate QSOs, and I could not make up the score well.

The final score was 477 QSOs and 52 multis.

IC-7610 6ele Yagi N1MM

Inside the band just after the start of the contest

Turn on the 7610's dual-watch function,

Monitor only the band scope without the sub's audio

Set the upper part of the band scope width to 10 kHz,

By always displaying the operational frequency of 10 kHz with auto-scrolling when the left and right frequency edges are exceeded,

This makes it easy to keep in tune and to find open gaps.

It was as crowded as 40m CW in a domestic contest in Japan.

The lower band scope can be set from 28.000 to 28.150, which is very convenient because you can look around the entire CW band and monitor the band openings at the same time.

In a World Wide contest, the bandwidth would be closer to 150, but for this ARRL CW contest, it seemed to only need to be expanded to the lower end of FT8, around 28.070.