CQWW SSB contest 2025 Final Result

 

new national record

  
Very happy with it and probably the very last year to set a high score on 10m during the current sun cycle.

Low Power was great and will be continued (but not always)

Free as a bird !

The 100 days are over!

Thirty years as a radio amateur do provide some insights.

And this is my final conclusion about this hobby:

• What good is a shack if there’s no transceiver in it?

• But what good is a good transceiver if there’s no perfect antenna available?

• And what good is that setup if there’s no other station or no propagation?

• But the very worst is having a good transceiver, perfect antennas, and far-away expeditions or propagation… but not being there yourself.

The most important element in the amateur radio hobby is T I M E — free time - being able to be there at the moment you need to be, day and night.

Starting today, my greatest investment ever begins to pay off.

I have closed the door to the capitalist world behind me, sold the most important part of my business, and with a part of that money I bought time — a lot of time.

Enough time to bridge the period until retirement.

Enough time to hopefully be present for at least two more solar cycles and to achieve all the goals I have set for myself.

The new OT1A story starts now… 

ARRL DXCC 200 Trident Award arrived

 200 confirmed countries on CW and SSB and Digital...

CQWW SSB Single Op Assisted Low Power 10M - first impressions

 

Yes, this is possible with only 100W and a good antenna on 28Mhz during one weekend...

After I had sworn last year never to compete again in the non-assisted category of the CQWW contest — due to the excessive FOMOM (fear of missing out multipliers) stress — I decided this year to participate in the low-power category, albeit assisted.

This, too, is a challenge.
You instantly know where the multipliers are, and you can usually hear them fairly well, but actually working them is another matter. You constantly end up in pile-ups with high-power stations, while the clock keeps ticking and running isn’t an option.
Operating with 100W, however, gives a much better sense of the antenna’s performance. That was my main concern this year: to answer the question — does a 5-element Yagi really make a difference compared to a standard 3-element Yagi?
In other words, can I build my station around a 3-element multiband antenna — such as an Ultrabeam VL2.3 — or should I (also) invest in several monoband Yagis?

The answer is clear: the antenna definitely makes a difference. I received numerous superior signal reports. With these excellent propagation conditions, 100W was enough to work the entire world on 10m. Sure, 1500W would have improved efficiency, but that’s about it. And this time no QRM complaints from neighbours.

For the future, it’s clear that in addition to the 5-element on 10m and the 2-element on 40m, I should add a 5-element (Momobeam?) for 15m and a 4-element (DXBeam?) for 20m.

Compared to last year, there were two major improvements: the entire contest was recorded, and the voice keyer was properly configured this time, resulting in excellent modulation.
That I had to run above 29 MHz is just a detail. It probably cost me quite a few QSOs (and a bit of ego), but the upper part of the band is much quieter — which should have had a positive impact on my error rate.

>1000 QSO with 132 countries and 38 zones as a fantastic multiplier result. I only missed ZD7, and zone 1 was so briefly open that I didn’t make it either. I also noticed that very few stations, even in the HP category, worked more than 38 zones. The icing on the cake was KH6 as my final QSO — worth two multipliers.

The ON record in SO(A)LP 10M will surely have been broken — propagation conditions were truly exceptional.

Onward to CW, as SO(A)HP 10M…

back on 160 meter band

I’m active again on 160m. 

The inverted-L antenna I used before could be reinstalled without any issues, and the old measurements are perfectly reproducible.
At the moment, I’m only using 9 radials, each 1/8 wavelength long, which I hope will to be buried in the ground during wintertime. In a few weeks, additional temporary radials will be added.

The SWR is OK within my operating (CW and FT8) range of the antenna and is 1:1 with the help of the TunerGenius.  

Over the past few evenings, 230 contacts have been logged, including 3 new countries (CU, OD, and T7), bringing my total number of unconfirmed entities to 99. Since I never received confirmation from JT1CO a few years ago, I hope to reach 98 confirmed DXCCs within a few weeks — just 2 more to go for 10-band DXCC. 

The other day I picked up a single signal from ZS1J, unfortunately too brief to make a QSO, and yesterday I was heard in ZD9 and  in Antarctica by DP0POL, but no one was active there at the time. 

The most important thing is that the antenna clearly has potential. One of these days, the BOG will be connected so I can improve my receive performance.

Final Countdown

The Final Countdown starts today.

Exactly 100 days left until the biggest change in my radio career, with more impact than any transceiver, amplifier, or antenna.

SO2V with flexradio 6400 and N1MM+

As described in the previous post, I have configured N1MM+ in SO2V mode to work with the FlexRadio 6400.

To recap: the 6400/8400 only has one SCU (unlike the 6600/8600 which has two), which means SO2R is not possible. However, two “slices” can be received simultaneously, but only on the same antenna. On the other hand, N1MM+ interprets the two slices as two radios because two COM ports need to be configured.

In short: to make N1MM+ work in SO2V mode with a FlexRadio 6400/8400, the configuration needs to be set up as if it were SO2R. At least, that’s my experience. Other opinions are welcome in the comments section below this blog.

The settings need to be adjusted at five different levels: DAX, CAT, N1MM+, SliceMaster, and CW Skimmer, which does not make things any easier.

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1. DAX:
Here it’s important that both RX and IQ streams are enabled. Last time I had to restart the SMART-SDR software several times to achieve this. But there is a much simpler solution: if no panadapter appears, you need to select one in the SDR screen on the left in the DAX panel. Contrary to what you might expect, this is not the same DAX button as the one to the right of X/RIT.  IQ-streaming is importart because it is the input for Skimmer.

Using all this software is a field of expertise in itself. Especially when certain features are used only occasionally, important items are quickly forgotten.

2. CAT:
Here the key is to provide a COM port for both slice A and slice B.

The choice of COM ports is entirely up to you, as long as they match the N1MM+ configuration and are not already in use by another Windows application.
VFO 1 (also called slice A) in my setup is linked to COM6, while VFO 2 (slice B) is linked to COM10. I also need a PTT link on COM7 (and COM11 for slice B), a Winkey link on COM9, and a UDP port 12060 (on the picture it is 12061, but better set it to the standard 12060) for sending spots. I’m not entirely sure how well this last one works, because the spot management is handled by SliceMaster (see below).
Finally, outside of contest use, there’s also TCP port 5003, which is used by FT8-WSJT.

 

 .

 

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3. N1MM+ configuration:
As mentioned earlier, the choice of ports is free, as long as they match the CAT software settings within SMART-SDR.
Here are the parameters per port, with the most important note being that “SO2R” must be checked — not SO2V, even though the latter might seem more logical.

 

 

Configuration of the broadcasting :

Port 7811 is used for a home-made application in Python that does a realtime QRZ.COM lookup of every worked call.

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4. SliceMaster:
This software makes it easy to link external programs to SMART-SDR. During contests, I use it for Skimmer and spot management; outside contests, for example, I can run two WSJT sessions simultaneously — for instance, listening at the same time on 50.313 MHz and 50.323 MHz.
The most important settings can be found here:

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5. Skimmer:
This decodes the CW signals for the two separate VFOs and adds them to the Telnet server. It’s very important that the Telnet session from N1MM+ is linked to Skimmer and not to a DX cluster. For this reason, the password in the Skimmer configuration must be disabled.

Below are the different configuration screens for Skimmer slice A and slice B:

 

Never use the reserved channels, always take IQ RX1 and IQ RX2.