Commonwealth Contest from VK5WIA HQ
From: Grant Willis (VK5GR)
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2025 02:00:07 GMT

Folks,

A short summary from VK5WIA/HQ

This year I had a quite amazing run on the high bands, finding 15m open to both the UK and Canada at the same time at 3AM as well as having a fantastic run on 10m at the start of the contest! While I didn’t hear the guys on VP8 I did work 9J, ZF, 6Y, 9V plus VO2AC (Zone 2). The run of G’s on 10m was great. 80m – I called quite often for short periods around the 00Hr mark on 80m but struggled to get many callers. I did at least pick up Tony 3D2AG on 80 as well as a few ZLs.  I also called Andy 5Z4VJ quite a few times, but he tells me his noise floor is terrible too and he never heard me, despite me hearing him on at least 3 bands.

There were also a few VKs I couldn’t reach. I could hear the VK2s and 3s on back scatter, but the signal was really weak and distorted. I couldn’t read you well enough to call. I suspected at the time you all had your beams back on to me too (I would have given the openings in progress). Working domestic 10m and 15m on such short hops is not easy it seems.

My main problem was the huge amount of RFI I copped during daylight hours. Unlike the east coast, we haven’t had any real rain since last August, and apart from a couple of days in September, and one rain event at the start of December we have had practically nothing since. This has meant that the noise from the 11kV power lines around here is through the roof during the day – and only really drops after about 9pm at night. This made daytime copy of long path G land very difficult indeed. VE short path was also a washout for the same reason,  and unfortunately, I slept through the VE LP opening Sunday morning having stayed up till 5.30am working both VE and G areas all night.

Overall, I can’t really complain as I did manage a new PB score of 4000+ points for this contest. Looking back through my logs the closest I had previously reached was in the low 3000s – so happy about that.

I hope the rest of the team stations did well. Looking at the online scoreboard however I suspect the Canadians may have whipped our backsides this time.  Let’s see how it plays out.

Contest: RSGBBERU

Band     QSOs     Pts  Cty  Sec  Pt/Q

   3.5      10     225    8    1  22.5

     7      26     630   23    2  24.2

    14      86    1630   39    7  19.0

    21      59     965   19    4  16.4

    28      65     890   16    1  13.7

Total     246    4340  105   15  17.6

Score: 4,340

1 Mult = 2.1 Q’s