A non-serious entry in REF-CW 2018

I had a bit of spare time over the weekend, so gave away a few points in the French REF-CW contest.

Equipment was my Elecraft K3 with just 40W out (to prevent QRM to neighbours) to my 30m dipole, tuned onto 40m. I’m not entirely sure how effective this was. Many stations seemed to struggle with my callsign, so I suspect I wasn’t very strong to them. Having said that, conditions on 40m did also seem genuinely rubbish with deep QSB. On a number of occasions, someone who was S9 when CQing was S0 and unreadable by the time they were giving my report – very frustrating!

I did try 5 QSOs on 80m but it was clear I was very weak there and everyone was struggling to copy me. That wasn’t a surprise, as my 30m dipole required several attempts by the K3s ATU to make it semi-happy, so I quickly abandoned.