After putting 1,264 contacts in the log, the bands are pretty much silent. Around the world the keyers are at rest, and thousands of us are in recovery mode after a hectic weekend of action on the air.

If you’re like me, your ears are still hearing ghosts of high-speed Morse code from CQ Magazine’s WPX – or Weird Prefix – CW contest.

There’s plenty to talk about – from conditions to the competition itself.

Welcome to episode 7 of Zone Zero.

This is Bud, VA7ST, on a Sunday evening and the CQ WPX CW contest ended a few  hours ago.

I decided to run high-power this weekend and I’m glad I did.

I have a single three-element yagi and some wires for 40M and 80M. With that antenna setup, for much of the weekend the bands were not strong enough to make a lot of contacts across North America and especially into Europe without pushing some power through the ether.

The first night and early Saturday morning were great fun. Sunday was painful and no fun at all.

The bottom dropped out of the bands mid-day Saturday and never recovered. Some pretty ugly aurora and soaring A-index ruined WPX CW this time out.

I was glad for the nice conditions in the first 12 hours prior to the hammering as Earth swept through the path of a coronal mass ejection or CME from earlier in the week. That path was a river of high-speed solar wind hitting us, buckling the magnetosphere, and decimating the ionosphere that carries our radio signals.

Within a few minutes mid-morning Saturday, the HF bands went from working nicely to totally broken – and the aurora went from not being a factor to controlling the rest of the contest.

Here’s a glimpse at how conditions changed during the contest:

Anyone who was in this contest for just day two must have felt cheated. Between 0220z and 1255z on Sunday, the A-index rose from 16 to 52. The aurora hit a high power level of 9.1 or 78 gigawatts of power before slowing declining to level 4.3 or 8 gigawatts by the end of the contest.

Sadly, the bands really didn’t respond – they usually take more time to improve as the geomagnetic conditions ease up.

I ended up beating last year’s score and outperforming my goal of 1.1 million points – finishing with 1.86 million. That’s my fourth-best ever in WPX CW, which is quite a surprise.

I had to take two multi-hour breaks on Saturday morning and afternoon so lost out on any European multipliers that might have added to the total — again, I never recovered from missing those crucial points and prefixes from Europe.

Having said that, I suspect there wasn’t much worked over the pole from here after 1700z Saturday, when we encountered that high-speed solar wind stream.

As 15M was not a factor in this contest – being totally dead much of the time, and even when it was carrying signals well, hardly anyone was up there to make use of the conditions.

The magic of skewed paths

In a previous episode, I mentioned the Scandinavian Express. That phenomenon occurs sometimes even when the aurora is extremely strong. Point north over the pole and you might still be able to work loud Scandinavian stations from Norway, Sweden and Finland because they’re so far north that they are actually inside the auroral oval.

Well, one of those miraculous Express contacts happened for me on Saturday afternoon on 15M. I was not working anybody at all, and figured why not check to see if Japan is hearing me. So I flipped the SteppIr yagi to Japan, about 45 degrees south from the normal bearing for Scandinavia.

I called CQ three or four times, and then — as if by magic — a loud signal filled the headphones. OH3Z. I touched the rotator controller and turned a few degrees further northward,and he got a bit stronger, but not a lot — he was working me on a skewed path while I was beaming Japan.