Well CQWW has been and gone and its now time to reflect on what actually happened during the weekend, at first I wasn’t sure if I was going to go or not due to the fact I’ve been ill for the last 5 weeks and last week broke 3 ribs.

But my need for a good session of contesting took over and on Friday evening I left for Dartford, arriving in at around 9pm, and setting up the station had started to begin, I started setting up the network which considered of three laptops on wifi and another one wired across the room with the CAT5e hanging from the roof!

Did come across one problem the laptop we were hoping to use for GPRS packet spots was giving us problems and although it saw the Vodaphone card for some weird reason we couldn’t get onto the web, let alone access any telnet clusters although this was later fixed in the morning (problem: due to settings)

00:00z the contest started! With Dave G4BUO and Simon M3CVN at the helm, rates were decent and contacts where starting to go into the log about 90mins on I took over from Dave and was on 80m, plus Bob VE3SRE on 40m.

Bob was working state side on 40m, no problems at all and the zones kept on coming while I was on 80m working the Europeans and yanks. one thing I did notice though was when it came to daylight UK time and the G stations started to come up, the [rant]rudeness of some of the stations was unbelievable and I think personally a few of them should be ashamed of themselves.

We sat on a frequency from 2am in the morning till 8am and had some person come up and order us to QSY because he’s had a net there for 30 odd years with his mate. [/rant] needless to say we did not move for him!

Part from that small problem the rest of the contest was fantastic with decent rates. 20 was fantastic Saturday Night/Sunday Morning with openings to PY, States.

Raw score:

160 269 44 9
80 921 70 12
40 446 79 17
20 1302 123 36
15 1319 120 32
10 603 87 22
==== === ===
4860 523 128 = 4,661,811

FT1000MP + Ten-Tec Centurion
FT1000MP MkV + Acom 1000
FT1000MP spotter
160m dipole up 60ft; 80m dipole up 55ft; 40m delta loop; 20/10m DX33
tribander up 60ft; 15/10m quad up 40ft; Butternut for spotting. 6-Pak
antenna switch, stubs and Dunestar filters. Win-Test for logging.

Note: more photos can be found here http://flickr.com/photos/m3php/sets/72157594350347660/