CQWW CW 80m QRP

Event: CQWW DX CW ham radio contest
Logger: N1MM+ most updated version
Station: Yaesu FT-817ND, 5W
Antenna: 84m horizontal square loop on 7m AGL.
CW decoder: FLdigi & MRP40




CW is not really my mode. But since it is easy to make a Dutch record I decided that would be a nice goal. Since my 84m horizontal loop is best for 80m I participated on that band only and to make things really difficult I operated QRP 5W. And that was not the only handicap. I'm unable to understand CW code (yet) so I have to decode with the computer. With my IC-706 I have a built in 250Hz CW filter which helps a lot. Unfortenately my FT-817 doesn't have a narrow filter and so decoding is difficult with a lot of stations in the spectrum. This year I used N1MM+ with FLdigi as CW decoder. Sunday morning I decided to use MRP40 as addition to see if it would be really worth 49 euro to register the software. I was only QRV very early in te morning Sat. and Sun. and sundayevening for half a hour. Worked 55 stations in total and managed to work 7 (!) stations from the USA and 1 from Canada. I encountered just one fellow blogger OQ5M Franki.

Dutch QRP records

I didn't spend much time in the contest in total it might be 3 hours. But still it was fun. Especially working the USA with only QRP power. I was really surprised by the signals sometimes 599 real report. I can only remember a signal on SSB like that years ago in the PACC from a Canadian station on 80m. Normally USA/Canada are just audible on SSB on my side. I guess the propagation was good this weekend? At least I reached my goal to set a Dutch record on 80m QRP. I guess real CW contesters are smiling when they look at my score, 55 QSOs is what they do in half a hour :-). But I don't care, at least I had fun.



About MRP40. Well I know it gets good reviews on several sites especially on the MRP40 site. It's a nice piece of software and sometimes it did decode better as FLdigi, sometimes it did not. It shure is not worth 49 euro for me. However it was a nice comparisation test.