40m Firecracker Sprint map
Last night and this morning I participated in PODXS’s 40m Firecracker Sprint contest. Unofficial results are posted on KJ4IZW’s contest scorer site.
This was my first time on HF (other than a little time spent operating PSK31 at field day a couple weeks ago) in over a year. I was trying to improve on my score from 2011 but fell short by a few multipliers despite operating the full 6 hours.
This year I made 54 contacts with 28 multipliers for a total score of 1512. In 2011 I had 53 contacts and 33 multipliers with a total score of 1749. I think I would have done better had I been more aggressive on calling CQ instead of wasting time looking for people to call in the first hour or two. The band was very crowded at the beginning of the contest and a lot of stations couldn’t hear me due to QRM. I should have picked a spot and called CQ, which is what I ended up doing later in the contest and it worked out very well.
This was also my first time using my new G5RV. In 2011 I would have been using the coax trap dipole in the attic, and I expected the G5RV at 30′ to outperform those results.