With a solar flux of around 68 – 70 what is to be done from Signal Point in late November? As the contest director for this event it is my task to put together a great team to milk the most from these challenging conditions and see if we can repeat last year’s win. The truth is conditions, as crappy as they’ll be, favor our location on the lower end of a north/south path into North America and all those lovely three point contacts.
CQWW SSB will be an operation by TEAM CANADA – a mix of folks from the Great White North, and those that wished they lived here. Yes – its true – we CAN walk on water – in the winter, which is another good reason to head south.
Jeff, K8ND and I have been running and winning single band 160 Meter contests remotely from Signal Point the last two seasons. The Stew Perry contest is a favorite because multipliers are based on distance and Curacao is a long way from even the United States. There is no east coast advantage!
The 50 year celebration in November of 2017 was an enormous success. Not only were we able to have W1FJ on the team exactly 50 years after he won the world in 1967, but we won it in ’17. This was our first win in CQWW CW, and everything came off as well as if we had scripted it. If you’ve missed it, please see the article about our operation in the May 2018 issue of CQ Magazine. Also, we QSLed the contest 100% and have received a great amount of favorable commentary worldwide for our efforts with that commemorative card.
The Caribbean Contesting Consortium has received a significant gift from our friend Al Rousseau, W1FJ. Al recently purchased a new Elecraft K3S, then graciously donated his existing Elecraft K3 transceiver to the club. As a result the club now owns four K3 transceivers! The new K3 had been checked out, updated, calibrated by Elecraft and arrived here at the N7IR radio ranch still sealed in its Elecraft shipping box. Al requested that the donation be dedicated to the original crew of PJ3CC, who won the 1967 CQWW CW contest from the Coral Cliff Hotel. Gene, KB7Q, who arranged the donation, had a small placard made that lists the members of the PJ3CC team, including Al (then W1FJJ).
Thanks to Gary, K9SG, who is a past member of the CCC, we now have a newer, better antenna to use as a fixed tribander at PJ2T. If you’ve operated at PJ2T you know we have Really Big Arrays to use in the very high-traffic directions – pointed at the United States and Europe. (In fact you’re probably aware by now that we are completely upgrading the Europe Array). In order to cover other important directions, we use a selection of other fixed and rotary antennas which require care and feeding too. Gary, who was active at PJ2T from 2003 to 2011, has given the club a Bencher Skyhawk.
As you can see online at www.pj2t.org, in the left frame, under “Upcoming Contests,” much planning has been done.
CQWW SSB will be based out of the white and blue Galo rental house on the hill with a heavily Canadian team and W3ACO feeding the team like royalty. There may be one open bed left. Interested?
CQWW CW also has one bed still open unless DF9LJ is able to get here for that contest. We’ve rented the Moran pool house for this contest.
ARRL CW (February 2019) is fully staffed, but if you’d like to join this team we can always find a room off site, no worries.
Last March, Gene Shea, KB7Q, and his XYL Joyce participated in an experiment with caretaking of the station. They stayed on site after I left and hosted contests and took care of the QTH and worked on several station projects. They of course paid no rent, and were reimbursed 50% of the metered utility usage and 33.3% of the cost of their rental vehicle. This is advantageous on both sides. This enabled them to have some time on the tropics and access to the big station inexpensively compared to the full costs of a rental home elsewhere in a warm place, yet it enabled PJ2T to continue to operate, provided the fun of remote operating PJ2T for those of us who do that, and made for great security for our house and equipment when teams visited. The experiment was a success, and they have indicated that they will probably do it again in 2019. The advantage for me is that I was able to leave about a month earlier than every before and get back to a happy non-solitary life at home with Dorothy. If any one else in CCC is interested in being caretaker at some other time of the calendar year, let’s talk…!
Because it was such a monumental occasion, being the 50th anniversary of the first entry into the CQ Worldwide contest from Signal Point, we opted to QSL 100% for this contest. Geoff, W0CG, designed a foldout commemorative card and arranged for printing by a vendor in Vancouver who has done super work for us before. PVRC donated $300 of the printing cost and our former member K4LT (now AD8CW) also donated $300. NA2U kicked in $50 and the club covered the small remaining balance. From there W9VA did a TREMENDOUS job printing and sticking labels and sending out the cards for distribution. W0TT, W0CG, and W1FJ himself also helped with the distribution.
Our club has been using Microsoft Windows 7 Professional operating system for many years now on our contest logging computers. It’s pretty stable, everyone has learned the interface, and it runs fine on modest machines. There are two issues however that suggest we might have to move on to Windows 10 down the line. WIN7 Install media and proper licenses for any new computers we get are getting harder to find, even on eBay. Microsoft stopped mainstream support for WIN7 in 2015, and will terminate all support the first day of 2020. Our computer are all hooked to the Internet so a steady stream of security patches is highly desirable to keep our machines safe. That will be ending in 2020.