Arrival

For this CQ WW SSB 2024 I booked the house on the beach to be able to have better working conditions as well as a quieter location compared to my home location.

I arrived on Friday night and installed the BuddiHex on its 7m Mastwerks.

I also installed the Flex 6600 / SPE Expert 1.3K-FA, the Flex Maestro C, laptop and network. All went well and performed the job within 1h30.

Contest Start

Started the contest straight at 7am local time with a good pile up on 10m with USA and Japanese.

But I must say that having this activity showed me how difficult it is to work a contest from those location such as South East Asia. No one has the beams turned to us and it is impossible to break the EU/USA wall. I could hear so many stations at S9+ here who never replied. I tried to call CR3A for 30 minutes without success. Conditions are definitely modest with a Hexbeam @ 7m above the ground and 1kw but frustration is very high when working a contest from South East Asia.

On Sunday I woke up at 3.30am to try and see what I could work on 20m, this is usually when we have New Caledonia as well as Carribean/USA. Again same story heard some new ones like V47T very strong but impossible to break the EU/USA pile up. Conditions have been excellent on 10m while 15m and 20m were dead during the saturday but at around 10pm local time the bands finally opened up and were full of signals !

On Sunday morning I went for a sleep at around 9am and when I woke up I saw the antenna / mast on the floor, it was heavily raining with a lot of wind and the antenna felt down while asleep. Two arms of the BuddiHex broke and I cannot repair so this signed the end of the contest for me last contact on Sunday morning at 1.49z or 8.49am local time almost 24 hours before the end of the contest.

Anyway the pile ups were a lot of fun even if not very long.

I end up with 792 contacts, not may multipliers as a majority of the contacts were Japan / China / USA.

Thanks to all who worked me or the ones I worked.