Zone Zero podcast

The contest ended on Sunday afternoon. I am ready to share my thoughts about CQ Worldwide CW for 2017. It’s a short episode recapping the biggest contest of the year.

The radio room is still a little unkempt after a solid weekend of amateur radio contesting over the November 25 and 26 weekend. If participation went according to recent trends, we had more than 8,000 contestants from around the world in the CQ Worldwide DX CW contest – it was a Morse code feeding frenzy for many of us, and I enjoyed every single second on the air.

Here in the radio room I still have a few coax jumper cables laying about, and my ears are still decoding Morse code in anything resembling a pattern of noise. It’s all over but for the ringing in my ears and some should’ve-would’ve thoughts.

First things first. How did I do, compared to my goals? The short version is I did a lot better than I ever thought I would.

I went in with a simple and — at the time last week when I divulged my predictions — lofty goal of 1,500 Qs, 150 multipliers – that’s the total number of CQ Zones and DXCC countries worked on each band — for a 500,000-point score.

I managed to finish with 1,989 contacts, 228 multipliers and 970,000 points. So I’m happy. I don’t think many people expected the bands to be as strong as they turned out to be. I sure didn’t.

It was so much fun I ended up putting in my longest-ever CQWW CW session — 37 hours is one more hour than I managed in 2012, which was my previous iron-pants record for this contest.

Thanks to some short-ish naps at just the right times — but not sleeping a lot longer than planned — I don’t feel too beat up at the finish line. Sure needed a LOT of coffee through the weekend.

Working the world

I think the best surprise was a ZS station from South Africa calling me on 15M during a US run Sunday mid-morning. the band shouldn’t have supported that path but the signal was loud and probably on a skew.

Going into the contest I was curious to see how the HQ9X lads would make out from Roatan, a Caribbean island off the Honduras mainland. They were booming in here every time I worked them (80M through 15M). If I ever get to retire, that’s the place for me. Verticals on the beach, and nothing but blue water to the horizon. Dream on, I guess. The XYL says I can go any time I want. And take the dog with me.

By the end I had netted 75 countries, so not even DXCC from here, but it was fun hunting for countries anyway. It would have been better if Saturday had not been so rough. I really missed Europe on 15M – all I was able to get on 15M across the Atlantic was a single Zone 33 in north Africa. Oh, and that lovely South African surprise.

I loved some of the runs on 15M and 20M. On Sunday afternoon I worked 418 stations in one session — peaking with a 60-minute rate of 185 per hour — before moving to 40M for the final hour or so.

The AL-80B amplifier here ran like a champ, but the sturdy old SB-221 was great until I needed to go to the AL-80B for 160M. Then I just left the 40-year-old Heathkit resting for the remainder of the contest.

Sidetracks

About two of my 11 off-hours were spent on gear. When I wanted to run the second radio (on 40M) while running on 80M, I couldn’t get it configured for about an hour. CAT wasn’t working properly, until I realized the radio was in memory mode not VFO mode. Duh. Fixed, and had a great time with dueling CQs on 40 and 80 for about three hours from midnight to 3 a.m. when it was slow enough to stay on top of things.

I would have made a lot more Qs on a single radio without the down-time getting the SO2R figured out,

For my money, the CQ Worldwide DX CW contest is the biggest, best and most fun contest of the year. I look forward to this one like no other, and it’s this coming weekend. If you operate Morse code and want to work a ton of DX in a single weekend, get on the air and join the fun.

CQ Worldwide CW is the subject for Episode 15 of Zone Zero. Let’s dive in!

If you were wondering where Zone Zero has been for the past month, worry not. No self-respecting contest podcast would dare miss the opportunity to preview one of the biggest contests on the annual calendar.

CQ Worldwide CW is a mammoth contest, with more than 8,000 competitors expected to jump in this weekend.

(See the year-over-year entry statistics).

If you think Morse code is on the way out, think again. Last year the CQ Worldwide CW contest had 8,341 logs submitted. The Phone contest a month earlier had just 7,576 entries.

Think about that. There were 765 more entries in the Morse code version than the SSB or Phone version of this contest in 2016. I don’t think most people would have ever expected that, but it is borne out by the CQ Worldwide entry statistics.

Generally, over the past 20 years we’ve seen a steady — and in some years very healthy — increase in the number of entries in this contest near the end of November. To give you an idea of the popularity growth, let’s take a look at 1996 versus 2016.

Two decades ago, 2,885 logs were submitted, and in 2016 a grand total of 8,341 logs came in. That’s 5,456 more competitors. Remarkable.

Curiously, in the CQ WW Phone contest the highest number of entries ever was in 2013, at the peak of Cycle 24, when nearly 8,500 logs were sent in for scoring. But the CW contest had its peak last year – three years after the Phone peak, and well into the decline of the current Solar Cycle. I don’t now why they aren’t in sync, but it is a curious phenomenon.

Why the growth in Morse code contest participation? Well, I think it’s a combination of technology and demographics. Contesting with automated systems – in particular the maturity of logging software like N1MM Logger that works seamlessly with transceivers to make operating so simple even I can do it – is a huge factor. The barrier to entering a high-speed Morse code contest today is far lower than it was two decades ago.

And the other factor, I believe, is demographics. We’re a lot older, and that means more of us are retired or at least able to devote the time it takes to seriously compete. Families are grown, our careers are either well in hand or behind us. And because we’ve been at this for decades, more of us have stations that are more than a radio on a side table. The kids are grown, and more of us have earned the time we spend in leisure.

We may be getting up there in years, but I firmly believe this is a golden age for ham radio contesting. Alas, the bulge of retired hams who enjoy competing will not last forever, and while there are a lot of younger hams getting into contesting, they will never match the numbers of those licensed in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s.

I am determined to enjoy this while it lasts. I dread the days when I am ready to retire in a decade or so (I’m only 52 now and need to keep working forever, it seems). We’re losing so many wonderful hams every year, and it leaves me a bit sad after a contest like the ARRL Sweepstakes earlier this month that reveals how old we’re getting.

But for now, in CQ Worldwide CW, we have more to celebrate than ever before. You’ll make more contacts per hour across the entire 48-hour weekend than at any time in the long history of amateur radio. So let’s get on the air and make hay while the sun shines.

The rules

Depending on where you are in the world, you’ll get one point for contacts with other countries on your continent ...

We’re into contest season, with some major events coming up in late October and November. What can we learn from recent conditions to help earn better scores?

That’s our subject for Episode 14 of Zone Zero. Let’s get started.

Thanks for joining in for Episode 14. Time sure does fly. When we started Zone Zero, spring hadn’t even arrived properly, and now here we are staring winter in the face. Boomer, the VA7ST Border Collie is still out there going crazy for his Frisbee but it won’t be long before Boomer is stepping through snow instead of green grass.

Over the summer I added a new radio to the shack – one that provides 2M all-mode capability – and a new amplifier, which adds high-power on 160M, which I’ve never had before. I did some antenna work, spray-painting the Steppir 3-element yagi with hunter green Krylon paint, and putting up an 8-element cross-polarized yagi for 2M.

I got hooked on meteor scatter modes on 6M, and I spent a lot of time poking around inside an old but wonderful amplifier looking for trouble I never did quite track down. But now the tools are put away, the lawns are being prepped for winter, and we put behind us those bright warm days that seemed to stretch out ahead of us forever just a few months ago.

Weekend contesting is back on the front burner here, and even with depressed radio conditions I’m still having a lot of fun making contacts in as many events as I can manage.

Over the past weekend, October 14 and 15, we had the international teletype contest known as the Makrothen – it’s a favorite of mine, because you get one point for every kilometer between you and the other stations you contact.

Scores go up quickly, especially if you can work DX stations.

But if you can only work domestic stations in your own continent – for me, that would be North America – the Makrothen can be a long slog, with low points per contact. I mention this because this time out, that’s precisely what we saw with conditions from the West Coast.

I could hear stations from the East Coast working European stations at will on Sunday morning, when I could barely hear the Midwest well enough to work them. That’s really frustrating – I knew my paltry score of 500,000 points wouldn’t be even close to competitive this year.

I’ve finished in the Top 20 worldwide in previous years, so the station itself isn’t the problem. It’s the HF bands themselves. They favor anyone who doesn’t rely on a path over the North Pole to reach Europe, and that’s going to dictate performance in the major contests coming up over the next few weeks.

The CQ Worldwide Phone contest is Oct. 27 and 28, and then a month after that is the CQ Worldwide CW contest on Nov. 25 and 26.

If you’re in the West, being competitive will require two things: wringing everything you can out of 15 meters if it opens at all, and working Asia across the Pacific to help make up for what you will miss looking a Europe.

It would be so rose-colored-glasses of me to say access to Japan and the rest of Asia without a polar path makes up in any way for being able to work Europe cleanly, but it doesn’t even come close. The fact is, Europeans won’t likely hit California and vice versa unless there’s a little flurry of sunspot activity in the days before the big contests.

I mentioned 15M because at this point in the solar cycle that band is just about dead most of the time. But through late September and the first half of October this year, there has been some life on 21 Mhz. Not a lot of life, but I expect that in the CQ Worldwide contests – Phone later in October and CW in late November – we will at least have openings across North America.

This will be important to watch for, because 20M is going to be the money band where you’ll work the most statio...

The fall contest season has begun. We got out of the gate in a hurry with CQ Worldwide RTTY – the granddaddy of radio teletype contests – and now we start a staccato rhythm of major contest weekends.

How are you plotting your course for the upcoming months to the holiday season? I’ll walk through my plan for fall 2017 activity on the contest calendar. Here’s a hint: It’s a very busy season.

That’s the focus for Episode 13 of Zone Zero.

Welcome to Zone Zero – the ham radio contesting podcast. This is Bud, VA7ST.

I have been very ambivalent about this fall and winter — as a radio contester I look forward to it like no other time of year, and yet this year I dread the conditions.

It’s going to be a tough grind through the very bottom of the solar cycle, and if you’ve been on the radio bands at all through the summer of 2017 you already know things aren’t what they used to be.

At this time two years ago, we were still in the hey-days of great radio propagation – things were only just beginning to drop off, but on any given weekend you could still fire up the radio on 10 meters and work big swaths of the world.

Not so much any more. Here in 2017, as we enter the always highly anticipated fall contest season, most weekends we will find 15M the highest workable band and 10M is merely a happy memory.

If you aren’t familiar with the 11-year solar sunspot cycle and how it affects ham radio, I encourage you to listen to several previous episodes of Zone Zero (Episode 1.1 – When things go horribly wrong — is probably a good starting point). I talk about the solar cycle a lot – because it is the most influential factor in determining whether the high-frequency radio spectrum will be usable at any given time.

For now, let me just acknowledge that we are nearly at the bottom of Solar Cycle 24. Sunspots are very rare these days, and it will be a couple of years now before we begin to see their numbers increase as we rise up into Cycle 25 and conditions start to improve.

The lower bands are less affected by low sunspot numbers – in fact, you may find 80M and 40M less noisy and long-distance or DX contacts could even be more frequent. Particularly in the winter months, during those long hours of darkness free from summer thunderstorms and atmospheric discharge noise.

But we will definitely miss the high bands – 10M and 15M. We probably will only see very sporadic domestic openings on 10M from now on, and 15M will produce fewer and fewer contacts even just in our own continent. From North America’s west coast, openings to Europe are now almost impossible on 15M, though I understand some brief magical openings have happened in recent days.

Generally, however, contesters will tend to gravitate to 20M during the daylight, and quickly move to 40M as late afternoon and evening arrive.

Overall, contest scores will plummet – in part because we will have fewer stations to work on a weekend, but we will also have dramatically fewer multipliers to work because entire bands are now out of the running.

Take 15M, for example. When sunspots are plentiful and conditions are strong, from the Canadian west I will work 60 or 70 countries with ease. But take Europe and Africa out of the mix because the trans-Atlantic and polar paths are closed, and I’m left with a smattering of Japan, Australia and New Zealand contacts to fill up the log beyond the work-them-anytime South American and Caribbean contest stations.

Well, that’s my reality for the next few years. But I won’t let it get me down. I know most of my competitors from this side of North America suffer the same fate – though the farther south you go, to California, for example, the better angle you have to work Europe without going through the heart of the auroral oval – which is the direct ...

Something every contest operator has thought about at one point or another is, “Why?”

Why do we put in the long hours for no tangible reward? Why do we build our stations with unstinting dedication? Why are we drawn to the sounds of a band throbbing with signals, only to eek out a tiny slot for ourselves to join the fray?

They’re good questions. And there are as many answers as there are people asking them. But the keenest response is that nobody really knows, and we all know.

That’s the focus for Episode 12 of Zone Zero.

Welcome to Zone Zero – the ham radio contesting podcast. This is Bud, VA7ST. It‘s Labor Day weekend, and I have a confession. This weekend I operated in the Russian RTTY contest, and it was the first contest I’ve been in since July.

Yes, you heard correctly. I have been taking a summer break. Despite being a seasoned contest operator, it is truly amazing how you can lose your edge after just a few weeks of lapsing into no-contest mode. It took me several minutes on Friday evening to get the radios sorted out for RTTY and get back into he groove of seamless exchanges with other competitor.

It reminds me quite clearly that practice – getting on the air – is so vitally important.

And that has me thinking this week about why we do this. What’s the attraction.

The closest I can come to an answer is that it is compelling like an adrenaline rush you seek over and over again. And it’s comforting to be part of a community of avid fellow competitors. Belonging to a group, even one as hyper-competitive as the contesting community, is just plain neat. We share in wins and losses, and it truly is more about competing than winning or losing. The journey is the destination.

Before any contest, I psych myself up far beyond any realistic expectation of results. I look at how I did in previous years, I study the current band conditions, and for major contests I study how my competition fared.

That’s a lot of pre-contest preparation, and it doesn’t include the actual station itself — just the operator. This week, I thought I’d run through my routine so others can compare it with how they get ready for a contest.

The first step is to look at the calendar every week, and pick a target. Most weekends offer multiple events, and it’s your choice which you will make time for. In my case, I look for the contest that will offer the biggest bang per hour — the mot contacts, or the most opportunities to work new DX entities or counties, or add to my all-time prefix total. But mostly, I go for the contest offering the most contacts pr hour — DX or domestic.

And that’s because one of the prime motivator for my contesting is year-over-year comparisons with how my station performs. I make antenna and equipment changes — hopefully most of them improvements rather than steps backward — and I can generally gauge the benefit of station improvements from one contest to the same contest the following year.

3830

I recommend all contesters consider sharing their contest stories and scores on the 3830 website. Many of the world’s most active contesters do this, and it is a lot of fun to read what others have to say after a contest and see their unofficial – or claimed – scores as they come in.

After a contest, I will write down my thoughts about what worked, what didn’t, and any notable events such as finding an opening I didn’t expect – noting what time of day and where I was pointing. I will also note any new equipment used, or particularly good DX worked.

I use my own 3830 reports as sort of a personal diary — I track just about every contest I enter, and there are more than 800 of those records on...

It’s a slow time for contesting but building your station is a great way to while away the summer. In fact, come September, October and November, you’ll be thankful for every little improvement you made over the summer months.

It’s no fun climbing a tower or working on antennas when it’s snowing and minus 20 degrees outside. So get it done now and be ready for the fall contest season.

We’ll talk about summer projects and more in episode 11 of Zone Zero…

Welcome to Zone Zero, the ham radio contesting podcast.

This is Bud, VA7ST, looking ahead to the North American QSO Party CW contest, on August 5 and 6 this year.

It’s 12 hours of intensive Morse code action on all bands from 10 through 160 meters, running a maximum of 100 watts.

For my money, the NAQP contests are about as enjoyable as it gets — casual, without a lot of over-powered signals jamming up the bands. It’s a very friendly outing with a bunch of mates — all the regulars you run into many weekends a year and lots of drop-ins and others new to contesting. In fact, the exchange between stations is your name and state or province, rather than an impersonal serial number.

You can only operate for 10 or the 12 hours, and off-times must be 30 minutes or longer. How you spread out your breaks is up to you, but remember some stations might run the first 10 hours straight and won’t be on the lower bands in the final two hours. While others will be there, and the more states and provinces you can land on 80M and 160M, the higher and more competitive your score will be.

My advice is to leave yourself time to get on for the final hour, at least, and pick up the multipliers just waiting for you to show up on 80M and 160M.

As always with the NAQP, you’ll need to decide what’s most important to you: racking up the most contacts by calling CQ and letting stations come to you, or searching for as many multipliers as you can. I usually try to strike a balance between these strategies.

I am always aware of the rarity of the VE7 or British Columbia multiplier, if few of my fellow Orca DXCC operators are on the air. If BC is rare in the NAQP, I will spend a lot more time running stations – eventually, even the rarest states will want BC in the log and chances are they will find me.

That’s my theory for NAQP, anyway. Doesn’t always work out, but that is part of the fun of contesting – you never get the same thing twice, and there’s always something new to challenge your skills and strategies.

Upgrading the station

Over the past few weeks, I have been working through a bunch of projects in preparation for the fall contest season. The key projects are:

Cabling for second radio: My old second radio is an FT-920, which I love, but it is now an older rig. I’ve put it into third-radio backup position now that I have a new the new Icom IC-7100 in the shack – it’s a cute but capable little friend for the FT-920 and my primary radio, an FT-2000.

I have the I C-7100 running 6M and 2M digital audio-based modes including the new and remarkable FT8 mode and meteor scatter using MSK144 mode. Now I need to get things going for CW, Phone and RTTY.

I am slowly working away at getting the CW and RTTY cabling set up between the contesting computer and radio, which meant building an FSK and CW keying circuit into a DB9 connector, and soldering up the correct connectors for the radio end of the cabling. It’s more complicated than it sounds, but one more evening ought to do it.

6M yagi upgrade: The other project is also a VHF radio improvement. I have a three-element Steppir yagi on the tower outside, and it has a fourth element – a passive, fixed aluminum director – making four elements on 6M. But,

Our long, hot summer rolls along with plenty to do. Thanks for listening to Episode 10 of Zone Zero. This week we’ll have a post-contest report on the IARU HF World Championships held over the past weekend, and a look ahead at the next fun contests on the summer calendar.

Welcome to Zone Zero, the ham radio contesting podcast.

This is Bud, VA7ST, just recovering from the International Amateur Radio Union’s IARU HF World Championship.

Here at the ham shack, about 711 contacts are in the log from the big worldwide event on July 8, and the bands were in remarkably good shape – far better than most of us would have predicted.

I operated in CW-only mode, with the amplifier turned on for a little help. I ended up beating my scores from three of the previous four years, which tells me there’s still life left in the ham radio bands despite nearing the bottom of the solar cycle.

In particular, 20M was pretty solid to Europe from western North America for much of Saturday, and I made as much as I could of the opportunity.

Multipliers are ITU zones and IARU headquarters stations in each country. I found a lot more of them this year than last year, and finished with 237,000 points – up from 48,000 last year and 82,000 in 2015.

15M even coughed up a few contacts (no Europe, though) when there haven’t been many on 15M in IARU over the past couple of years.

I enjoyed some great runs on 40M including a brisk 150 in a row from about 0300 to 0500z, and also a nice steady run of 74 on 80M just after 0600z.

All in all, it was a fun day and I put in about 13 hours on the air, taking some nap breaks and going to bed at 1 a.m. local on Sunday morning, only to get up for the final hour of the contest from 4 to 5 a.m. local. I managed to add another 40 contacts on 80M and 40M, including attracting some loud Japan stations on 40M before the final buzzer went off at 5 a.m.

I sure hope you got on, and that you had as much fun as I did.

Three for the heat

Now we look ahead to mid-July’s trio of contests – the Digital Modes Club (DMC) RTTY, the North American RTTY QSO Party, and the CQ World Wide VHF contest.

As I mentioned last time, I am a bit more excited than usual about the DMC RTTY and the CQ World Wide VHF contest.

Digital Modes Club (DMC) RTTY

This one is restricted to speedy 75-baud RTTY and PSK63 modes. Now that I have an Icom IC-7100 radio with built-in sound card, I look forward to taking it for a spin using PSK-63 and also seeing how it works on high-speed teletype using an FSK connection.

Multipliers in the DMC RTTY are every unique callsign prefix, but just once per prefix even if you work them again on another band. Things get underway at 1200 UTC on July 15 and go for 24 hours.

North American RTTY QSO Party

If you like a bit more rate than the DMC offers, there’s the NAQP RTTY, which runs for 12 hours on Saturday – but you have to take off at least two hours, leaving only 10 hours of operating time available.

The breaks must be 30 minutes or longer, so you can take two hours all at once, or a couple of one-hour breaks, or four half-hour breaks – lots of ways to slice and dice your off-time.

I will usually take the off-time in late afternoon and preserve as much evening time as I can for the lower bands.Multipliers in the NAQP are each state, province and North American DXCC country you work on each band.

You are not imagining things. Conditions really are slack, and it’s not just the time of year.

Summer months are typically slower, hazier, lazier times for contesters, but now that solar cycle 24 is closing in on the bottom of the deep performance trough that arrives every 11 years, this summer and perhaps the next two years will be a little – how shall I put this? – iffy-er than the great years we’ve had.

But don’t let that get you down. If you love radio contesting – and who doesn’t? – there’s actually more to do than one person has a right to expect for the rest of June and through much of July.

We’ll take a look at a bunch of contest activity in Episode 9 of Zone Zero.

Welcome to Zone Zero, the ham radio contesting podcast.

This is Bud, VA7ST, fresh back from a salmon fishing excursion on beautiful Vancouver Island, during which I landed a 12-pound pink salmon but lost the little derby with my two boys, one of whom caught a 20-pound white Chinook salmon and the other hauled in a 15-pounder.

 

Any way you slice it, that is plenty of fish packed home in the cooler. What we couldn’t eat fresh is now hard-frozen awaiting summer barbecues.

It is summer, so station-building continues. In our last episode, I talked about a new amplifier in the station – the AL-80B, which will give me some high power on 160M which I’ve been missing all along.

The Summer Stew

On June 18, we ran in the Stew Perry Top Band Distance Challenge – lovingly known as the “Summer Stew” – as a maiden voyage for the new amplifier on Top Band. I had grand visions of hundreds of QSOs running 500 watts to the full-sized inverted-L antenna.

But that wasn’t in the cards at all.

The Summer Stew doesn’t see a whole lot of activity – thunderstorms make for terrible noise across a lot of North America, so people go to bed rather than fight QRN all night.

And so, I only managed to make contact with a miserly 17 stations, netting a grand score of 38 points. And one of those was a 10-pointer with KH6ZM in Hawaii. But the amplifier performed like a champion, and the inverted-L offered a very low SWR, taking all that new power very nicely.

All Asia not so much

On the same weekend (June 17 and 18), we had the All Asia CW contest. That was 48 hours of very little coming out of Asia for this particular ham radio station.

Truthfully, conditions were so bad I only ended up putting in an hour and a half over the weekend working Asian stations. A measley 19 of them – 11 on 20M and 8 on 40M. It was just that bad here in British Columbia.

I invoked the familiar refrain: there’s always next year.

Ugggh. UKR-CLASSIC RTTY.

And then there was the Ukrainian Classic DX RTTY Contest – not to be confused with the Ukrainian DX Digi Contest, which ran over the June 24 weekend.

In the Classic DX RTTY, I made just three contacts – one in California, one in Hungary and one in Georgia. The state, not the country.

I’ll admit I was kind of preoccupied during that weekend plotting how I was going to catch more fish than my two boys, and even that plan didn’t pan out. In the end, I landed 39 contacts across three entire contests, and one fish on my vacation trip.

Better luck next time, I guess.

Field Day and Ukrainian DX Digi

The ARRL Field Day was this past weekend, June 24 and 25, along with the Ukrainian DX Digi contest.

I made a couple of contacts in the RTTY contest, but my focus was on Field Day. I started in the morning checking the battery packs for emergency power, and setting up a pair of 40-watt solar panels to ...

The prime contest seasons are behind us and ahead of us, so we’re in what I like to consider the summer doldrums.

Not a lot of really big contests to jump into, but plenty of interesting events if you’re looking for some ham radio action on a late spring and early summer weekend.

Let’s go take a look in Episode 8 of Zone Zero.

Welcome to Zone Zero, the ham radio contesting podcast. This is Bud, VA7ST, your faithful contesting observer, reporting in after a couple of weeks of downtime following the big WPX RTTY contest at the end of May.

Since then, I’ve been in station-building mode. Nothing major, I guess, but it sure has been an interesting couple of weeks as I have been addressing the shortage of HF amplifiers.

The little side-trip into technical country began the night after WPX CW. With nothing to work on, I decided to fix up a failing SB-221 amplifier, which had a tube go dark on me a couple of months ago. After checking things out I narrowed the problem to the now-dark Eimac 3-500Z tube itself.

That old tube has been in service since the day the amp was built in 1978, that’s 39 years of faithful high power for me and the unknown number of hams who owned it before me so that tube owes me nothing but happy memories. But I couldn’t give up on it without a fight.

Taking a tip from one of the online reflector groups, I re-soldered the filament pins – actually doing all five pins while I was at it — and the tube came back to life just fine.

But that got me going down a rabbit hole of changes to the amplifier. I spent an evening re-wiring for 240-volt service, as I now have a 240-volt circuit in the radio room. But when that didn’t appear to work, I returned the amp to 120-volt configuration.

After three more nights I finally traced the problem back to the breaker box. In the load-center, someone had put the double-pole breaker on a single pole of the mains power. I moved that double breaker one position over, and solved the problem – nice and stiff 240-volt service in the shack.

I spent an additional hour reconfiguring one of my SB-221 amplifiers for 240 volts, and haven’t looked back.

But that tube I mentioned? It bothered me that I don’t have a backup tube in case one fails in either of my Heathkit amplifiers. So I went online looking for a spare.

DX Engineering, Ameritron and RF Parts all sell 3-500ZG tubes for about the same price — US$220.

RF Parts won’t ship tubes outside the US. But DX Engineering and Ameritron will ship 3-500 tubes, and get my endorsement.

However, the currency conversion from US to Canadian dollars makes the price from any retailer a bit high — US$220  right now is $296 Canadian, plus shipping. So I looked around on Canadian swap and shops for a used 3-500Z tube.

And amazingly, I found one!

Well, it took a few days of hunting as these aren’t the most common spare part around. But Rick VA7EM, about half an hour’s drive from where I live, was selling an Ameritron AL-80BX amplifier with a spare 3-500Z as part of the package.

My ham-guy brain was ticking over pretty fast as I realized an AL-80B is a fine modern amplifier with a single 3-500Z tube providing about 600 watts out on 160M CW, plus it does the WARC bands for a bit of DXing firepower. My trusty SB-221 amplifiers have dual 3-500Z tubes and are bulletproof contest units putting out a kilowatt all day long if I wish, but they don’t do 160M or the WARC bands.

So,

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.