Sweepstakes Results for 2012

Well I kept up the time-honored tradition of missing 1 or 2 Sections in the CW SS contest this year. Had about 575 QSOs (a personal best) and all but 2 Sections – MB and NNY. I never had trouble with a New York section before. I guess the monster storm Sandy may have been the reason, as they were all trying to get their lives back together and probably had little time for playing with radios.

I did not make any further adjustments of my ZS6BKW (ref: earlier posts on this subject). The SWR was well within usable range for the CW Band segments and I did not want to jeopardize that just before the Contest. Now that CWSS is over, I may get back to some final tweaking of this antenna to see if I can get 80m Phone in the 3:1 range needed by the IC-7600’s internal tuner.

I did try the 20m 4-element colinear antenna this year. I can’t say I was real impressed. I guess a fixed antenna with higher gain is not really what I want. Next year I may go to something rotatable. I did pickup a couple sections with the colinear that I could not get with my other wire antennas, but overall I am not sure it was worth the trouble.